Thermal Behavior of Asynchron Motor under Different Operation Conditions

Abstract

Electrical motors today are present in many industrial processes, cover a wide range of mechanical equipment and play a major role in critical industrial applications. Infrared thermography is a non-invasive, non destructive inspection method which has been extensively applied in diverse fields of electric installation. In this work, infrared thermography is used as tool in order to measure the heating behavior of a 1.1 KW three-phase squirrel cage asynchron motor under different operation conditions using the Jenoptik VarioCAM® 7800 infrared camera. In all cases, three regions of interest of the motor, the ball bearing, the frame and the windings, were inspected. The experiments show that the infrared images in the windings show the highest precision in predicting the thermal behavior of the asynchron motor.

Keywords

• infrared thermography
• asynchron motor
• windings
• thermal behavior
• phase failure