Design and fabrication of power electronic controllers for certain home appliance motors
PI: Prof. Vivek Agarwal, Electrical Engineering
Tata Fellow: Arpan Hota (2016-19)
Single phase induction motors are extensively used in home appliances such as washing machines, mixers, grinders, vacuum cleaners, fans and so on. They run on single phase electricity supply commonly available in households. These motors suffer from drawbacks such as poor efficiency, poor power factor (PF) at the source, low power density and noise. Poor efficiency results in considerable wastage of the generated electrical energy, poor power factor and current distortion caused by these appliances lead to line voltage distortion and harmonic losses in the system, requiring the utility to spend large amounts of money for compensation. Our intention is to design effective and efficient power electronics for novel AC motors proposed by researchers at MIT for applications in home appliances, leading to compact, high PF, high efficiency, low noise systems.