In recent years, the study of new methodologies for the development of highly efficient products has aroused the interests of manufacturers of electric motors.
For this reason, is becoming increasingly important to have a new multi-test, modular and reconfigurable test bench, able to perform functional tests, not available on the common diagnostic systems in industrial production line.

AMBER is our solution to this need, the test bench that the Research@Industry team has been developing for several months.
Amber is a modular and reconfigurable multi-test station for electrical motors, suitable for Measurement & Testing, both in production lines and laboratories, allowing to perform motor development and prototyping, performance characterization, diagnostics, stress test and life-test on several kinds of electrical motors.
It was conceived in the framework of the research project EROD (Energy Reduction Oriented Design), which ended in November 2012 and has been partially funded by the Ministry of Economic Development, through the “Industry 2015”

We have designed a standard version with different sensors (a triaxial accelerometer, two microphones, a laser Doppler vibrometer and a torque sensor to acquire both the torque and the rotational speed), several specific acquisition channels available for the electrical characterization (voltage and current), the control of the braking and the dragging systems fully integrated in the test stand software.

The test can be performed at different cycles of the motors with editable speed profiles and all the measurement channels are synchronized at high sampling rates.

Several analysis can be performed, such as:

• electrical power test (active, reactive and apparent power)
• currents / voltages time signal analysis
• back EMF analysis, mechanical frictions and cogging analysis (with dragged motor)
• NVH test (frequency domain, order-tracking, RPM vs Frequency & Time vs Frequency domain, diagnostics)
• torque, power and speed comparison.
• hall Sensor / Encoder Track Test
• electric Load simulation

Moreover, the versatility of the acquisition system and of the hardware is a fundamental requirement; according to this aspect, the test-bench is totally customizable to achieve the customer specifications in terms of sensors, analysis, handling and more.

This system is also available for measurements campaign directly in the Loccioni Research@Industry labs.

Lucia Arcaleni and Gialuca Agostinelli

Gianluca Agostinelli, Research@Industry PhD

Lucia Arcaleni, Research@Industry