AC induction motor slip

Mauri Peltola

What it is and how to minimize it

The alternating current (AC) induction motor is often referred to as the workhorse of the industry
because it offers users simple, rugged construction, easy maintenance and cost-effective
pricing. As a result of these factors, more than 90 percent of motors installed worldwide are AC
induction.

Despite its popularity, the AC induction motor has two limitations: It is not a constant-speed
machine, and it is not inherently capable of providing variable-speed operation. Both limitations
require consideration, as the quality and accuracy requirements of motor/drive applications
continue to increase.

Figure 1. Cutaway of squirrel cage AC induction motor opened to show the stator
and rotor construction, the shaft with bearings and the cooling fan

How maintenance and asset management helped it beat the odds.

Motor slip is necessary for torque generation

An AC induction motor consists of two assemblies, stator and rotor. The stator
structure is composed of steel laminations shaped to form poles. Copper wire coils
are wound around these poles. These primary windings are connected to a voltage
source to produce a rotating magnetic field. Three-phase motors with windings
spaced 120 electrical degrees apart are standard for industrial, commercial and
residential use.

The rotor is another assembly made of laminations over a steel shaft core. Radial
slots around the laminations' periphery house rotor bars, cast-aluminum or copper
conductors shorted at the ends and positioned parallel to the shaft. Arrangement of
the rotor bars resembles a squirrel cage; hence, the term squirrel-cage induction
motor. The name "induction motor" comes from the AC "induced" into the rotor via
the rotating magnetic flux produced in the stator.

The interaction of currents flowing in the rotor bars and the stators' rotating
magnetic field generate torque. In actual operation, rotor speed always lags the
magnetic field's speed, allowing the rotor bars to cut magnetic lines of force and
produce useful torque. This speed difference is called slip speed. Slip also increases
with load and is necessary for torque production.
Slip depends on motor parameters

The formal definition of slip is:

S = (ns - n) x 100 percent/ns , where

ns = synchronous speed

n = actual speed

At low values, slip is directly proportional to the rotor resistance, stator voltage
frequency and load torque, and inversely proportional to the second power of
supply voltage. The traditional way to control wound-rotor-induction-motor speed is
to increase slip by adding resistance in the rotor circuit. The slip of low-hp motors is
higher than that of high-hp motors because rotor-winding resistance is greater in
smaller motors.

As seen in Table 1, smaller and lower-speed motors are associated with higher
relative slip. However, high-slip large motors and low-slip small motors also are
available.

Table 1. Motor slip of selected aluminium and cast iron NEMA motors, with
synchronous speed ranging from 3600 RPM to 900 RPM

As one can see, full-load slip varies from less than 1 percent (in high-hp motors) to
more than 5 percent (in fractional-hp motors). These variations may cause load-
sharing problems when motors of different sizes are connected mechanically. At low
load, the sharing is about correct; but at full load, the motor with lower slip takes a
higher share of the load than the motor with higher slip.

As shown in Figure 2, rotor speed decreases in proportion to load torque. This

means that rotor slip increases in the same proportion.

Key:
A = Synchronous speed

B = Rotor speed

C = Rotor slip

D = Torque

Figure 2. The speed curve of an induction motor. Slip is the difference in rotor
speed relative to that of the synchronous speed. CD = AD - BD = AB.

Relatively high rotor impedance is required for good across-the-line (full voltage)
starting performance (meaning high torque against low current), and low rotor
impedance is necessary for low full-load speed slip and high operating efficiency.
The curves in Figure 3 show how greater rotor impedance in motor B reduces the
starting current and increases the starting torque, but it causes a greater slip than
in standard motor A.

Figure 3. Torque/speed and current/speed curves for a standard motor A (full

lines) and a high-torque motor B (dotted lines).

Methods to reduce slip

Synchronous motors, reluctance motors or permanent-magnet motors don't slip.
Synchronous motors commonly are used for very high-power and very low-power
applications, but to a lesser extent in the medium-hp range, where many typical
industrial applications are found. Reluctance motors also are used, but their
output/weight ratio is not good and, therefore, they are less competitive than
squirrel-cage induction motors.

Permanent magnet (PM) motors, which are used with electronic adjustable-speed
drives, provide benefits such as accurate speed control without slip, high efficiency
with low rotor losses and the flexibility of choosing a very low base speed,
eliminating the need for gearboxes. PM motors are limited to special applications,
mainly because of high cost and the lack of standardization.

Figure 4. The effect of the slip compensation.

Selecting an oversized AC induction motor also reduces slip. Larger motors exhibit
less slip, and it gets smaller with a partial (rather than full) motor load.

For example, refer to Table 1. The required power is 10 hp at about 1,800 rpm and
1.5 percent speed accuracy is required. We know that a 10-hp motor has a slip of
4.4 percent. Can we achieve an accuracy of 1.5 percent with a 15-hp motor?

Answer: The full-load slip of the 15-hp motor is 2.2 percent, but the load is only
10/15 = 0.67. The slip will be 67 percent of 2.2 and equals 1.47 percent, which
fulfils the requirements. A disadvantage to oversizing is that larger motors consume
more energy, increasing investment and operation costs.

Adjustable-speed AC drive often is the best solution

Using adjustable-speed control can solve AC induction motor limitations. The most
common AC drives use pulse-width modulation (PWM). Line voltage is rectified,
filtered and converted to a variable voltage and frequency. When frequency-
converter output is connected to an AC motor, it's possible to adjust motor speed.

When an AC drive is used to adjust motor speed, motor slip is no longer a problem
in many applications. A number of drive applications still exist, including printing
machines, extruders, paper machines, cranes and elevators, in which high static
speed accuracy, dynamic speed accuracy or both are required.
Rather than oversizing the motors to eliminate the slip-induced speed error, it may
be better to use sectional drive line-ups with separate inverters for each motor. The
inverters are connected to a direct current (DC)-voltage bus bar supplied by a
common rectifier. This is an energy-efficient solution because the driving sections
use the braking energy from decelerating sections (regeneration).

To reduce motor slip, compensation can be added to AC drives. A load torque signal
is added to the speed controller to increase the output frequency in proportion to
the load. (Slip compensation cannot be 100 percent of the slip because rotor
temperature variations cause over-compensation and unstable control.) But the
compensation can achieve an accuracy as great as 80 percent, reducing slip from
2.4 percent to 0.5 percent.

Figure 5. Block diagram of Direct Torque Control, DTC

Vector and direct torque control improve speed control

The newest high-performance technologies in adjustable-speed drives field are

vector control and direct torque control (DTC). Both use some type of motor model
and suitable control algorithms to control torque and flux, rather than the voltage
and frequency parameters used in PWM drives. The difference between traditional
vector control and DTC is that the latter has no fixed switching pattern for each
voltage cycle. DTC switches, instead, the inverter according to the load 40,000
times per sec. This makes DTC especially fast during instant load changes and
minimizes the need for and effect of dramatic speed changes once the load or
process is in operation.

What is DTC?

DTC is an optimized AC drives control principle, in which inverter switching directly

controls flux and motor torque.

The input variables for DTC are motor current and DC link and voltage. The voltage
is defined from the DC-bus voltage and inverter switch positions. The voltage and
current signals are inputs to an accurate motor model, which updates stator flux
and torque every 25 microsec.

Two-level motor torque and flux comparators compare the actual values to the
reference values produced by torque and flux reference controllers. The outputs
from these two-level controllers are updated every 25 microsec. and they indicate
whether the torque or flux must be changed.

Depending on the outputs from the two-level controllers, the switching logic
optimizes inverter switch positions. This means that each single voltage pulse is
determined separately at "atomic level." The inverter switch positions determine
motor voltage and current, which, in turn, influence the motor torque and flux (this
closed loop control eliminates the need for encoders in many applications).

The reason DTC control reacts faster than PWM control is shown in Figure 6. The
motor is running with low load at point A and the load has a stepwise increase to
high load. The higher torque with the PWM control is achieved by reducing speed
from A to B, which is quite slow. The higher torque with the DTC control is achieved
by direct increase of torque from A to C about 10 times faster than that of PWM
control.

Figure 6. Comparison between PWM modulation and DTC drive control during load
impact: A to B with PWM control and A to C with DTC control.

Slip compensation with DTC is instantaneous and produces a nominal slip of 10

percent. This translates into a speed accuracy of 0.1 percent to 0.5 percent. This
enables DTC drive use in many applications where a tachometer-based vector
control was needed previously. For applications demanding an even higher
accuracy, it's possible to add a pulse encoder to a DTC drive.

Mauri Peltola is the former marketing manager of ABB Oy, Drives in Helsinki,
Finland. He can be reached at Mauri.Peltola@fi.abb.com