iLab - iDyno
Traditional machines laboratories are expensive to equip and generally under-utilized for much of the year, and then over-committed for short periods. It is also possible that without careful design and extensive safeguards, students can put themselves or the equipment at risk.
- Principal Investigator - Geoff Walker
- Start date - February 2003 — January 2004
- Goal - To create an instrumented variable speed drive and induction machine experimental test bench which can be operated and interrogated remotely via the web.
- Overview of project - Traditional machines labs have perhaps a few small electric machines, or perhaps a few larger machines. These are a large capital expensive which is under-utilised for much of the year except for peak loads when they become a bottleneck due to their limited number. iDyno is an variable speed motor drive (VSD) and 4 pole squirrel cage induction motor combination, loaded by another identical VSD and induction motor acting as the dynamometer. The two VSDs will have their DC links connected so most power is “circulated”, and only the losses are supplied. Since the machines and drives are identical, this will also enable more accurate assessments of efficiency. The machine under test will also have the ability to be started via a contactor “DOL” (Direct On-Line). Numerous quantities such as instantaneous and RMS currents, voltages, speeds, torques, and temperatures are instrumented and available for analysis. Various simple operational parameter sets can be queued to form simple experiments operated in batch mode from which the results can then be downloaded (e.g. steps in torque at a constant speed). In this way the students and instructors have freedom to create various experiments to discover various things about the test setup. A webcam will also provide visual feedback of the batch experiment. It is hoped that “timecode” caught as part of the video clip of the batch process will allow the experimental results to be aligned with the images if desired.
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