State-of-the-art and Future trends in Industrial Drives

摘要

By adopting known, proven concepts, it is possible to dramatically increase the efficiency of systems driven by electrical machines and reduce total electricity consumption by over 7%. There is a trend for increasing efficiency within the electrical machine itself, but the greatest gains are at system level when the machine is combined with a power electronic converter to create a variable-speed drive. The main barriers to this lie in the initial cost of a variable-speed drive, even though in many cases the payback period is short. Future advances in technology will reduce the capital cost of the drive, and therefore existing markets will grow and new markets will open up.