Electrical machines and drives being developed within the Clean Sky programme are adopting novel, power-dense, circuit and electromagnetic topologies working close to the material limits and excited by non-conventional waveforms. This brings about requirements for increased health-monitoring and cooling demands for both motor and convertor and thus temperature and vibration monitoring are fundamental. This translates in an increase in temperature sensing requirements for correct thermal management and therefore added component count. With motor-drives going at high speeds and high frequency there are challenges for data acquisition and challenges for determining the rotor speed using resolvers. The use of such conventional sensors, for both temperature and position/speed measurements pose a significant reliability overhead.

Over the past years optical fibre sensors based on Bragg gratings have been developed for quasi-distributed temperature and strain/vibration measurements. This project therefore aimed to explore the possibility of using such technology as a replacement to conventional bulky systems prone to EMI issues whilst at the same time provide a test platform which will provide the necessary feedback on the axial the circumferential distribution of key parameters such as temperature and strain. The same applies in terms of power electronic convertors for heat sink design validation and online device temperature monitoring. Thus, the development of such a SMART self-monitoring motor drive provides a method for enhanced reliability and time-to-failure prediction.

The purpose of this project was to develop a test setup able to investigate the integration of In-fibre gratings within the electrical drive components including the machine itself and associated power electronics. Work will be done to extract temperature and strain data, this data will in turn be fed-back into lifetime models used to predict/monitor the drive’s operating conditions.