Project Report Practical 2:

The object of this exercise is to see how the synchronous machine can control the power factor of
the system.

We know that when the motor is started it runs as an induction machine because initially there is no
excitation to the rotor. This results in the machine drawing lagging current because it is seen as an
inductor.

When excitation current is applied to the rotor it will create a magnetic field which will magnetically
combine with the field of the stator then run at synchronous speed. In effect this reduces the
reactive power and current drawn by the stator form the supply. The more field current is increased
the more the reactive power and stator current will decrease. Once all the reactive power has been
effectively been absorbed from the stator to rotor, the machine will not draw any reactive power
from the supply. The power factor at this stage is at unity and the stator current is at minimum so
the system sees the load as resistive.

If the rotor current is increased beyond unity then it will become over excited so the machine will
draw negative reactive power and stator current will increase again. The power factor will change to
leading making the machine appear as a capacitor.

If we were to plot the stator current against the field current the resultant graph will produce a v-
curve.

In this lab experiment the synchronous motor is connected to a 3 phase supply. The rotor is
connected to a variable 220Vdc supply. There was supposed to be two 3 phase watt meters, one for
the power drawn by the stator and one for the rotor field. However, only single phase watt meters
were available and only one was connected. This resulted in having incomplete results because there
was no other way of getting the power. This however was not a critical problem because the results
we did have were enough to show the resulting curves although the power factor was a bit too
small.

After the motor has started, the rotor current is increase from zero. As the current was increase in
the rotor, the stator current and power decreased. The more the current was increased the
corresponding stator current decreased to its minimum and then started increasing. The power
factor does the inverse i.e. it starts from a lagging power factor and goes up until unity where it’s at
its maximum then to leading.

From this experiment we were able to deduce that for a low field current the stator current is high
and lagging and for a high field current the stator current and leading.