Field weakening is a method of raising the speed in DC motors.

If the field (magnetic field) is weakened by reducing field current, back emf is reduced and
thereby more armature current is drawn.

Now torque is produced due to interaction of armature current and field flux. It is interesting that
one quantity (armature current) is increasing while the other (field flux) is decreasing. But the
effect of increased armature current on torque happens to be more prominent than the effect of
decreased field flux. So the motor accelerates, its speed increases, but at the cost of torque.

So if we want to increase speed without sacrificing torque, field weakening is not recommended.
Instead, we should increase speed by increasing armature voltage.

Need for field weakening

First of all, when is field weakening needed? A motor directly connected to the grid (50 or 60Hz)
doesn’t need field weakening. The demand for it comes when we start using variable speed
drives (called VSD or VFD). From 0 to 50Hz the flux will be kept at 100% as we’d like to have a
torque approximately proportional to the current:

T∝I

Which is not always as linear but that’s the goal of the motor control software because this was
and still is the strong part of the brushed DC motors and people like it that way (maybe also
because it’s optimal for a lot of AC motors).

Voltage is speed and current is torque. This is the reason why brushed dc motors are so easy to
control. Modern AC motor control tries to imitate this behavior as good as possible.

Drives people usually talk in percentage or per units (p.u.) which refers to the motor nominal
data. This simplifies the life as we don’t need to care about units.

100% current => 100% torque

Still talking in in percentages, we now can see with the general torque equation why 100% flux
is good:

T=ψs–––×is––

E.g. With 50% flux we would need double current to have the same torque.

But there is a operating range where the flux needs to be reduced and that’s when we’re going
higher in speed than the field weakening point. To make things simple we consider a standard
50Hz motor. And there the FWP (field weakening point) is at 50Hz. Motor designer have a
different definition, I know but in the industry it’s done like that.
Voltage is speed

This is how the output voltage looks like for variable speed applications (in per unit notation).

As we reach the 1 p.u. speed (this depends on the motor nominal data e.g. 50Hz) the voltage is
not increased anymore and kept at 1 p.u. (e.g. 400V).

That’s the definition of field weakening. The flux is reduced with1n

where n is the speed in p.u. It will get clearer why we use the per unit notation in this case. In
order to calculate the flux level at 110% speed we do the following.

11.1=0.91

This is 91% flux. If we take a look at the torque equation we can guess that 10% more current is
need to reach nominal torque. And it’s getting worse the higher the speed goes.

This range is often called constant power range because if current I and voltage V is kept
constant so the power is:

S=3–√⋅V⋅I

This gives us two speed ranges:

 < 1 p.u. is the constant torque range

 > 1 p.u. is the constant power range

But there is a limit for how far we can go in maximum speed. The motor maximum torque (pull-
out torque for induction machines) is going down 1n2
which is faster than the flux. Where the two curves intersect depends on the maximum torque of
the motor.

For big motors the FWP will be moved by design if needed to cover high speeds or high torque
at low speed.

Advanced discussion: Why?

But why do we need field weakening? In short, because voltage is speed and at nominal voltage
we reach the following limits:

1. The drive maximum output voltage

2. The motor insulation

For standard motors it’s wise to stop at nominal voltage.

The following equation shows that the circular velocity of the rotating flux vector depends on the
voltage :

ddtψs–––=us–––−rs––is––

At high speed the stator resistance can be neglected as us⋙rsis

ddtψs–––≈us–––

The following picture visualises the equation where u is the velocity vector of the flux vector psi.
With the same voltage the angular velocity can be increased by reducing the magnitude of the
flux.

The circular velocity is defined as follows:

|u––|=|ψ––|α˙

AC motors are normally operated up a constant V/Hz line. But this is only possible up to the
nominal point on the rating plate. If you go above the rated frequency, up the V/Hz line, the iron
circuit will be saturated.

To avoid this the trick is to increase frequency with s constant voltage.

The net effect is known as field weakening - the flux is reduced. One can go faster, but not
produce more Kw.