Motor innovation for a greener world

Globally, electric motors use nearly half of all the electric energy we produce. Let me repeat that: HALF OF ALL ELECTRICTY. And while there are over 11 billion motors produced each year – most of which are used in very low power applications like disk drives, DVD trays and small cooling fans – it is in the 100W+ motors where small efficiency gains can lead to massive cumulative savings.

In fact, one TI customer is using our latest motor control innovation in ventilation fans for an installation at a farm in The Netherlands. This customer was able to reduce total motor energy consumption by 80 percent! This is because, like many motors in use today, current was simply being wasted without producing power that was being put to use. The same is happening in a variety of variable speed, variable load motors that touch our lives every day: auxiliary pumps, compressors, and specialized traction motors in vehicles; compressors, fans, blowers, and pumps in home and building ventilation systems; refrigerators, washing machines, and dishwashers in our houses; and a variety of industrial fans, pumps, generators, compressors, and tooling that keep the infrastructure of our factories, businesses, and cities alive.

If we increased efficiency of just this set of motor-driven systems we could potentially deliver a 15 percent reduction in overall global energy consumption – that’s huge! The European Commission has been adopting directives to improve the environmental impact of these motors and drives at the design stage, and I foresee similar initiatives spreading across the globe.

The way to save massive energy is simply by enabling more engineers with the solutions that have only been available to the experts today: cost effective advanced motor control chips that can take advantage of complex current control strategies with additional solutions to the overall system design challenges faced during development. We are doing this with innovative software that we market as our InstaSPIN™ family of motor control solutions. With these solutions we put expertise on-chip. On low cost C2000 Piccolo chips to be exact, and our revolutionary FAST™ software encoder eliminates the mechanical sensor which has been such a deterrent to the deployment of highly efficient current control techniques.

We also solve system design challenges by identifying individual motor characteristics (tracking and compensating for their changes over time), automatically tuning the current control system for maximum efficiency, and enabling rapid tuning and deployment of simple to complex velocity and motion control systems. This expertise is enabling more “high use” applications, like compressors, fans, pumps, escalators, industrial drives, and traction machines, to finally be controlled in the most efficient way at an affordable system cost.

While I may be a “motor head,” I like to think I’m contributing to a greener world by helping TI pioneer some of the innovations.

Get control with TI’s InstaSPIN

Buy the TMS320F28332/4/5 now at Mouser Electronics

This Post originally appeared in the  On the Fringe blog on E2E.

For more On the Fringe blog posts, click here .