Techno-economic optimal power rating of induction motors

Abstract

Electric motors are valuable, long-life industrial assets, whose lifespan is often measured in decades. A period of unplanned motor downtime in an industrial plant frequently incurs an expenditure of thousands of euros per hour. As a consequence, plant engineers often focus their decisions on reliability rather than on operating cost (energy bill). Unfortunately, the high price of energy and its growing trend mean that operating cost has an increasingly negative impact on production cost and company competitiveness.

The problem of selecting the rated power of a line-operated single-speed electric motor to drive a time-variable mechanical load has traditionally been solved, based on the well-established root mean square (RMS) value of the time-power profile of the mechanical load. This conventional method of rating is strictly technical, since the rated power of the motor is determined, based only on the power profile of the load. No other factors are considered, such as the energy consumption throughout the whole in-service life of the motor, or, even better, the whole life cycle cost (LCC), which is defined as the net present value of purchasing, installing, operating (energy), maintaining and decommissioning the motor throughout its life. As a consequence, conventional rating often leads to the selection of motors with a power rating that is technically sufficient to drive the mechanical load, but insufficient to do so with the lowest possible energy (losses) consumption, or even better, with the lowest possible life cycle cost.

A new analytical method to determine the techno-economic optimum power rating of a line-operated single-speed electric motor to drive a time-variable mechanical load will be introduced in this paper. The proposed method takes into account not only the technical restrictions due to the time-power profile of the mechanical load, but also the whole life cycle cost. Based on the list of electric motors offered in the manufacturer’s catalogue, the new methodology enables the optimum techno-economic rated power of the motor to be calculated, which minimizes the energy consumption (energy loss) throughout its in-service life or its total life cycle cost. The results show that the optimum techno-economic rating is one or two rated-power levels above the conventional rating based solely on the RMS load.