Performance Comparison of Electric Drives for Chopping/Shredding Sugarcane in Sugar Industry

A performance comparison of the conventional slip ring induction motor (SRIM) drive and the recently inducted variable frequency drive (VFD) in the sugar industry, for sugarcane preparation (chopping/ shredding of sugarcane), is carried out to assess their effectiveness and to explore better electric drives for the application. These high inertial machines demand high starting torque and mitigating means to reduce surge load due to the impact load imposed on them. Though, both the drives meet the requirement but the SRIM drives are subjected to huge slip power loss, low power factor, unequal load sharing problem for coupled motors and high drop in rpm, whereas VFDs are subjected to the problems of input current harmonics, high dV/dt stress and common-mode voltage (CMV). In this paper, along with the performance comparison a three/four-level multilevel inverter (MLI) fed open-end winding induction motor (OEWIM) drive is also proposed as an improvement over the existing ones.