Performance Comparison of Electric Drives for Chopping/Shredding Sugarcane in Sugar Industry

Abstract

A performance comparison of the
conventional slip ring induction motor (SRIM) drive and
the recently inducted variable frequency drive (VFD) in
the sugar industry, for sugarcane preparation (chopping/
shredding of sugarcane), is carried out to assess their
effectiveness and to explore better electric drives for the
application. These high inertial machines demand high
starting torque and mitigating means to reduce surge load
due to the impact load imposed on them. Though, both the
drives meet the requirement but the SRIM drives are
subjected to huge slip power loss, low power factor,
unequal load sharing problem for coupled motors and
high drop in rpm, whereas VFDs are subjected to the
problems of input current harmonics, high dV/dt stress
and common-mode voltage (CMV). In this paper, along
with the performance comparison a three/four-level
multilevel inverter (MLI) fed open-end winding induction
motor (OEWIM) drive is also proposed as an
improvement over the existing ones.