The importance of continuous functioning of electrical equipment in such spheres as aerospace industry, atomic industry and medicine can’t be overestimated. In this regard, the issue of technology processes optimization in these spheres is especially relevant. Scientists of South Ural State University are working in this direction.
One of the projects, entitled “Enhancing survivability of electric drives of critical purpose objects”, is implemented under supervision of Doctor of Engineering Sciences, Professor Yury Usynin. The research was noted with a grant of the Forward to Discoveries – 2017 contest. Author of the project, master’s degree student of the Department of Electric Drive and Industrial Automation of SUSU’s Polytechnic Institute, Maria Krupnova, told us about how electric drives are going to be improved.
Medicine, transportation of hazardous materials and other areas
“Enhancement of electric drives’ survivability is a very important issue, as requirements to safety at industries and in the medical sphere are very high. What can happen in a result of a phase break or a motor’s complete failure? It means that a hospital might be blacked out, or that the conditions necessary for surgery equipment won’t be created. Thus, improvement of electric drives in the sphere of medicine is a very topical and a very demanding task. Besides, a lot of attention is focused on survivability of electric drives in weight-handling complexes for moving potentially hazardous materials, oil and gas products, as well as in rocket and aviation systems. We are working on classification of reasons for motor failures in an electric drive, and are developing algorithms for ensuring failure tolerance.”
Standard approaches to enhancing survivability of electric drive are based on failure-free operation of the mechanism with set functions at various types of failures. The efforts to provide the necessary system functions in emergency mode often lead to hazardous situations, threatening to life and health of people.
Damaged system will be taught to resist
Evaluation of electric drives’ survivability indicators is carried out on a supercomputer with the use of ANSYS program. Simulated processes show the ways of negative impact such as insulation damage, phase break, etc. The scientists study behavior of the motor in various situations. The understanding of its behavior will allow for improvement of the whole system. Moreover, it will be possible to teach it to resist during future negative impacts.
“We are trying to determine possibilities of the motor’s functioning in cases of partial failure. We proposed various criteria for assessment of a motor’s survivability indicators. Result of the research will be the possibility to use the developed mathematical models for evaluation of such indicators as sustainability, survivability and maintainability. In the future, algorithms of system operability recovery at the presence of single or multiple failures in the form of a program code will be developed,” explains Maria Krupnova.
Inventions of the Polytechnic Institute’s team of scientists will allow ensuring functioning safety and limiting risks of emergency operation modes of electrical equipment (lung ventilator, radar stations, etc.). Moreover, risks of losses at enterprises will be minimized. At the moment, two applications have been submitted for obtaining certificates of state registration of programs for computers.
