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ABSTRACT

India needs to conserve energy in electrical utilities so as to

overcome the electricity shortage being faced throughout the country. The
Electricity generation has got significantly improved in the country during the
last ten years; but still, the gap between the energy requirement and the
energy generation is very large due to Increased Industrial load, Inferior
Quality, Losses, Large number of Agriculture Pump-sets, and Improvement in
the Standard of Life of the average Indian. Demand for electrical energy for
irrigation purposes has been growing steadily in India. Moreover, water
resources in the country have been dropping continuously for the last one
decade due to less rain-fall and more usage. The farmers have to be educated
in the area of energy conservation and proper utilization of available resources
in the country. Macro-level data clearly suggests that the electricity
consumption in agriculture has been increasing along with the increase in the
area irrigated by groundwater. Based on the report submitted by National
Productivity Council (NPC) to Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE), it is clear
that the scope of energy-savings in Agriculture-Sector is around 27786.97
Million Units, out of the 92335.28 Million Units of consumption.

The Submersible Induction Motor losses can be reduced by design

optimisation and bringing in improvements in manufacturing methods. In
recent years, researchers have been using soft-computing techniques to
determine the parameters for optimum-design of industrial type Induction
Motors. In these methods, the optimisation of design parameters of
Submersible Induction Motor is not feasible due to the cost involved in the
manufacturing process.
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Persistent use of groundwater has led to wells being bored

increasingly deeper, and farmers requiring higher-capacity pumps to lift water.
This extraction has not only increased the costs to the farmers and the utilities,
but progressively worsened water availability in various regions of the
country as assessed by the Central Ground Water Board. Submersible motors
with advanced inverter-based drives are not suitable to the agriculture motors
used in India, due to higher depth of the bore-wells, voltage fluctuations in
larger level, and non-affordability of the farmers in India. One of the
objectives of this dissertation is to investigate the possible efficient techniques
towards energy conservation in Submersible Induction Motors for Agriculture
and Irrigation.

The parameters that influence the magnetic circuit, namely, Stator-

Leakage-reactance, Magnetizing-reactance, Rotor-Leakage-reactance,
Resistance corresponding to Iron-Core Loss, Stator Phase Current, and
Magnetizing Current have been considered for the selection of optimum slot-
model. Analysis has been performed through the interactive software package
from ANSOFT Corporation, namely, Rotational Machine Expert (RMxprt).
The core-length has been varied based on the power rating of the motor, the
magnetic loading and the electric loading values have been adjusted so as to
optimize the core-length and other performance parameters. The electric
loading value has been kept slightly higher for the submersible motor
compared to the normal industry-type motor because of the forced-water
cooling.

The leakage-reactances to do with Slot, End-Winding, Differential,

and Skewing of the stator and the rotor have got reduced. Increases in Iron-
Core Loss Resistance and Magnetizing-reactance have brought down the loss-
component current and the magnetizing current, resulting in the improvement
of the operating power factor. The stator phase current of the proposed slot
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type motor is found to be less, and this has resulted in significant

improvement in the efficiency, when compared to that of the existing slot type
motor. The motors have been manufactured with the proposed design and
have been coupled with a centrifugal pump, and performance was studied.
The current and the power drawn from the supply have got reduced. The
speed of the pump got increased and hence, there is a corresponding
improvement in the discharge and the overall efficiency of the Pump-set.

The water discharge of the pump from the bore-well at the time of
starting is more due to stagnant water. As the time passes, the water discharge
from the pump gets reduced due to poor water-resource. In such
circumstances, the pumps are operated continuously with less discharge, and
either a tank or a mud-reservoir is usually employed to store the water. After
storage, the water is used to irrigate the field. To avoid this, a flow-based / a
discharge-based automatic ON / OFF control of submersible motor has been
employed to conserve energy in critical and over-exploited water-resource
areas. Irrigation control has been incorporated in the motor starter with Flow
sensor, Moisture sensors, and Solenoid valves so as to improve the utilization
of water and power consumption in the Agriculture Sector. The Electronic
Flow Control mechanism was fixed with a 7.5-HP, 20-stage Submersible
pump-set. This resulted in more discharge of water with less power
consumption.

It has been reported by the motor manufacturers of Coimbatore that

most of the insulation failures are at the overhang portion of the winding near
the driving end. The causes have been analysed from the field-visits and the
service reports of the motors, and it is concluded that the failure of the
insulation is due to overheating caused by the variation in Supply Voltage at a
larger level and operation of the motor at deeper bore-wells with poor cooling.
Heat dissipation was enhanced by employing a process called forced
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convection that increases the flow-velocity of the ambient fluid on the heat
transfer surface. The performance test was carried out in industry test-setup-
sump and found that the operating temperature got decreased with little
increment in power consumption. In most of the submersible applications,
simple and constant-speed drives, with throttling or damper control, are used
resulting in poor efficiency and over-sized drive systems. By implementing
variable-speed operation in pumping applications, the energy savings could be
increased. However, due to higher cost of the conventional variable-speed-
drives vis-à-vis fixed-speed-drives, the variable-speed drives have not
penetrated much into such cost-sensitive applications. The other objective of
the work is to bring in SR Motor drive as an alternative to Induction motor
drive, as SR Motor drive is found to be competitive for low-cost variable-
speed applications.

As a startup, initially a 3-HP, submersible SR motor with 8/6

configuration has been designed with the modifications, namely, new stator-
pole-shape suitable to the submersible motor, suitable extension of the rotor
with the position sensing disc, compartments to fix the sensor unit, and drive
unit so as to get them accommodated inside the existing submersible pump-
set assembly. The Classic Bridge Converter (CBC) has been chosen and
implemented as the converter for the Switched Reluctance Motor due to the
reasons, namely, feasibility of Phase independence, Quicker Commutation
with free-wheeling, less complexity of control, Reduction in Device rating,
and DC supply utilization is good. The fabricated submersible SR Motor was
connected with a 36-stage centrifugal pump, and performance test was carried
out. The results show that the adoption of these SR motors in the agriculture
field will give immense benefits to the user, as well as to the country and the
global environment at large. Moreover, these motors operate from a DC link
voltage; hence, in future, it will be more adaptable to Solar-PV-based-pump
applications.