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Induction
motors

by Chris Woodford. Last

updated: April 21, 2020.

D
o you know how
electric motors work?
The answer is
probably yes and no! Although many of us have learned how a basic motor
works, from simple science books and web pages such as this, many of the
motors we use everyday—in everything from factory machines to electric trains
—don't actually work that way at all. What the books teach us about are simple
direct current (DC) motors, which have a loop of wire spinning between the
poles of a permanent magnet; in real life, the majority of high-power motors use
alternating current (AC) and work in a completely different way: they're what we
call induction motors and they make very ingenious use of a magnetic field
that rotates. Let's take a closer look!

Photo: An everyday AC induction motor with its case and rotor removed, showing the copper
windings of the coils that make up the stator (the static, non-moving part of the motor). These coils
are designed to produce a rotating magnetic field, which turns the rotor (the moving part of the
motor) in the space between them. Photo by David Parsons courtesy of US DOE/NREL.

Contents How does an ordinary DC

1. How does an motor work?
ordinary DC motor
work? Artwork: A DC electric motor is based on a loop of wire
turning around inside the fixed magnetic field produced by
2. How does an AC a permanent magnet. The commutator (a split ring) and
motor work? brushes (carbon contacts to the commutator) reverse the
electric current every time the wire turns over, which keeps
3. How does an AC
it rotating in the same direction.
induction motor
work?
 4. Induction motors in
practice
5. Advantages and
disadvantages of
induction motors
6. Who invented the
induction motor?
7. Find out more
The simple motors you see explained in
science books are based on a piece of wire
bent into a rectangular loop, which is
suspended between the poles of a magnet.
(Physicists would call this a current-carrying
conductor sitting in a magnetic field.) When you
hook up a wire like this to a battery, a direct
current (DC) flows through it, producing a
temporary magnetic field all around it. This
temporary field repels the original field from the

permanent magnet, causing

the wire to flip over.
Normally the wire would
stop at that point and then
flip back again, but if we use
an ingenious, rotating
connection called a
commutator, we can make
the current reverse every
time the wire flips over, and
that means the wire will
keep rotating in the same
direction for as long as the
current keeps flowing.
That's the essence of the
simple DC electric motor,
which was conceived in the 1820s by Michael Faraday and turned into a
practical invention about a decade later by William Sturgeon. (You'll find more
detail in our introductory article on electric motors.)

Before we move on to AC motors, let's quickly summarize what's going on here.

In a DC motor, the magnet (and its magnetic field) is fixed in place and forms
the outside, static part of the motor (the stator), while a coil of wire carrying the
electric current forms the rotating part of the motor (the rotor). The magnetic
field comes from the stator, which is a permanent magnet, while you feed the
electric power to the coil that makes up the rotor. The interaction between the
permanent magnetic field of the stator and the temporary magnetic field
produced by the rotor is what makes the motor spin.

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How does an AC
motor work?
Unlike toys and flashlights,
most homes, offices,
factories, and other buildings
aren't powered by little
batteries: they're not supplied
with DC current, but with
alternating current (AC),
which reverses its direction
about 50 times per second (with a frequency of 50 Hz). If you want to run a
motor from your household AC electricity supply, instead of from a DC battery,
you need a different design of motor.

In an AC motor, there's a ring of electromagnets arranged around the outside

(making up the stator), which are designed to produce a rotating magnetic field.
Inside the stator, there's a solid metal axle, a loop of wire, a coil, a squirrel
cage made of metal bars and interconnections (like the rotating cages people
sometimes get to amuse pet mice), or some other freely rotating metal part that
can conduct electricity. Unlike in a DC motor, where you send power to the inner
rotor, in an AC motor you send power to the outer coils that make up the stator.
The coils are energized in pairs, in sequence, producing a magnetic field that
rotates around the outside of the motor.

Photo: The stator makes a magnetic field

using tightly wound coils of copper wire,
which are known as the windings. When
an electric motor wears out, or burns out,
one option is to replace it with another
motor. Sometimes it's easier to replace
the motor windings with new wire—a
skilled job called rewinding, which is
what is happening here. Photo by Seth
Scarlett courtesy of US Navy.

How does this rotating field

make the motor move?
Remember that the rotor,
suspended inside the magnetic
field, is an electrical conductor.
The magnetic field is constantly
changing (because it's rotating) so, according to the laws of electromagnetism
(Faraday's law, to be precise), the magnetic field produces (or induces, to use
Faraday's own term) an electric current inside the rotor. If the conductor is a ring
or a wire, the current flows around it in a loop. If the conductor is simply a solid
piece of metal, eddy currents swirl around it instead. Either way, the induced
current produces its own magnetic field and, according to another law of
electromagnetism (Lenz's law) tries to stop whatever it is that causes it—the
rotating magnetic field—by rotating as well. (You can think of the rotor frantically
trying to "catch up" with the rotating magnetic field in an effort to eliminate the
difference in motion between them.) Electromagnetic induction is the key to why
a motor like this spins—and that's why it's called an induction motor.

How does an AC induction motor work?

Here's a little
animation to
summarize
things and
hopefully
make it all
clear:

1. Two
pairs of

electromagnet coils, shown here in red and blue, are

energized in turn by an AC supply (not shown, but coming in
to the leads on the right). The two red coils are wired in series
and energized together and the two blue coils are wired the
same way. Since it's AC, the current in each coil doesn't
switch on and off abruptly (as this animation suggests), but
rises and falls smoothly in the shape of a sine wave: when
the red coils are at their most active, the blue coils are
completely inactive, and vice-versa. In other words, their
currents are out of step (90° out of phase).
 2. As the coils are energized, the magnetic field they produce
between them induces an electric current in the rotor. This
current produces its own magnetic field that tries to oppose
the thing that caused it (the magnetic field from the outer
coils). The interaction between the two fields causes the rotor
to turn.

3. As the magnetic field alternates between the red and blue

coils, it effectively rotates around the motor. The rotating
magnetic field makes the rotor spin in the same direction and
(in theory) at almost the same speed.

Induction motors in practice

What controls the speed of an AC motor?

In synchronous AC motors, the rotor turns at exactly the same speed as the
rotating magnetic field; in an induction motor, the rotor always turns at a lower
speed than the field, making it an example of what's called an asynchronous
AC motor. The theoretical speed of the rotor in an induction motor depends on
the frequency of the AC supply and the number of coils that make up the stator
and, with no load on the motor, comes close to the speed of the rotating
magnetic field. In practice, the load on the motor (whatever it's driving) also
plays a part—tending to slow the rotor down. The greater the load, the greater
the "slip" between the speed of the rotating magnetic field and the actual speed
of the rotor. To control the speed of an AC motor (make it go faster or slower),
you have to increase or decrease the frequency of the AC supply using what's
called a variable-frequency drive. So when you adjust the speed of something
like a factory machine, powered by an AC induction motor, you're really
controlling a circuit that's turning the frequency of the current that drives the
motor either up or down.

What's the "phase" of an AC motor?

We don't necessarily have to drive the rotor with four coils (two opposing pairs),
as illustrated here. It's possible to build induction motors with all kinds of other
arrangements of coils. The more coils you have, the more smoothly the motor
will run. The number of separate electric currents energizing the coils
independently, out of step, is known as the phase of the motor, so the design
shown above is a two-phase motor (with two currents energizing four coils that
operate out of step in two pairs). In a three-phase motor, we could have three
coils arranged around the stator in a triangle, six evenly spaced coils (three
pairs), or even 12 coils (three sets of four coils), with either one, two, or four
coils switched on and off together by three separate, out-of-phase currents.

Animation: A three-phase motor powered by

three currents (indicated by the red, green,
and blue pairs of coils), 120° out of phase.

Advantages and
disadvantages of
induction motors

Advantages

The biggest advantage of AC

induction motors is their sheer
simplicity. They have only one moving part, the rotor, which makes them low-
cost, quiet, long-lasting, and relatively trouble free. DC motors, by contrast, have
a commutator and carbon brushes that wear out and need replacing from time
to time. The friction between the brushes and the commutator also makes DC
motors relatively noisy (and sometimes even quite smelly).

Artwork: Electric
motors are extremely
efficient, typically
converting about 85
percent of the
incoming electrical
energy into useful,
outgoing mechanical
work. Even so, there is
still quite a bit of
energy wasted as heat
inside the windings—
which is why motors
can get extremely hot.
Most industrial-
strength AC motors
have built-in cooling
systems. There's a fan
inside the case attached to the rotor shaft (at the opposite end of the axle that's driving whatever
machine the motor is attached to), shown here in red. The fan sucks air into the motor, blowing it
around the outside of the case past the heat ventilating fins. If you've ever wondered why electric
motors have those ridges on the outside (as you can see in the top photo on this page), that's the
reason: they're cooling the motor down.

Disadvantages

Since the speed of an induction motor depends on the frequency of the

alternating current that drives it, it turns at a constant speed unless you use a
variable-frequency drive; the speed of DC motors is much easier to control
simply by turning the supply voltage up or down. Though relatively simple,
induction motors can be fairly heavy and bulky because of their coil windings.
Unlike DC motors, they can't be driven from batteries or any other source of DC
power (solar panels, for example) without using an inverter (a device that turns
DC into AC). That's because they need a changing magnetic field to turn the
rotor.

Who invented the induction motor?

Artwork:
Nikola
Tesla's
original
design
for the
AC

induction motor. It works in exactly the same way as the animation up above, with two
blue and two red coils alternately energized by the generator over on the right. This
artwork comes from Tesla's original patent deposited at the US Patent and Trademark
Office, which you can read for yourself in the references below.

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) was a physicist and prolific inventor

whose many amazing contributions to science and technology have
never been fully acknowledged. After he arrived in the United States
at the age of 28, he began working for the famous electrical pioneer
 Thomas Edison. But the two men fell out disastrously and soon
became bitter rivals. Tesla firmly believed that alternating current
(AC) was far superior to direct current (DC), while Edison thought
the opposite. With his partner George Westinghouse, Tesla
championed AC, while Edison was determined to run the world on
DC and dreamed up all kinds of publicity stunts to prove that AC was
too dangerous for widespread use (inventing an electric chair, to
prove that AC could be lethal, and even electrocuting Topsy the
elephant with AC to show how deadly and cruel it was). The battle
between these two very different visions of electric power is
sometimes known as the War of the Currents.

Despite Edison's best (or worst) efforts, Tesla won the day and AC
electricity now powers much of the world. That's largely why many of
the electric motors that drive the appliances in our homes, factories,
and offices are AC induction motors, powered by rotating magnetic
fields, which Nikola Tesla designed in the 1880s (his patent,
illustrated here, was granted in May 1888). An Italian physicist
named Galileo Ferraris independently came up with the same idea
at around the same time, but history has treated him even more
cruelly than Tesla and his name is now all but forgotten.

Find out more

On this site

Batteries

Eddy-current brakes (electromagnetic brakes)

Electricity

Electric motors

Engines
 Hub motors

Linear motors

Stepper motors

On other sites

Electric motors and generators by Joe Wolfe. The excellent Physclips

website has a superb page comparing the various different kinds of DC
and AC motors with some really great animations.

PBS: Tesla: Master of Lightning: An excellent mini-site about Nikola

Tesla, his life, and his amazing inventions.

Books

For older readers

Electric Motors and Drives: Fundamentals, Types and Applications by

Austin Hughes and Bill Drury, Newnes (Elsevier), 2013. Induction motors
are covered in chapters 5, 6, and 7.

Wizard: Life and Times of Nikola Tesla by Marc J. Seifer, Kensington,

2016.

Tesla: Man Out of Time by Margaret Cheney, Touchstone, 2011.

For younger readers

Electricity for Young Makers: Fun and Easy Do-it-Yourself Projects by

Mark deVinck. Maker Media/O'Reilly, 2017. A great hands-on
introduction to electricity, including a couple of activities that involve
building electric motors from scratch. Ages 9–12.

Electric Motor Experiments by Ed Sobey. Enslow, 2011. This is a great

general introduction to electric motors, with plenty of wider science and
technology context. For obvious practical and safety reasons, however, it
focuses on DC motor projects only, and is best for ages 11–14.

Power and Energy by Chris Woodford. Facts on File, 2004. One of my

books covering the story of human efforts to harness energy, from
ancient times to the present day. Ages 10+.

Nikola Tesla: Developer of Electric Power by Chris Woodford, in

Inventors and Inventions, Volume 5. New York: Marshall Cavendish,
 2008. A short biography of Tesla I wrote a few years ago. At the time of
writing, the whole thing seems to be accessible online via this Google
Books link. Ages 9–12.

Patents

Patents offer deeper technical detail—and an inventor's own insights into their
work. Here's a very small selection of the many US patents covering induction
motors.

US Patent 381,968: Electromagnetic Motor by Nikola Tesla, May 1, 1888.

The original AC induction motor patent.

US Patent 2,959,721: Multi-phase induction motors by Thomas H Barton

et al, Lancashire Dynamo & Crypto Ltd, November 8, 1960. An induction
motor with improved speed control.

US Patent 4,311,932: Liquid cooling for induction motors by Raymond N.

Olson, Sundstrand Corporation, January 19, 1982. An efficient method of
liquid cooling a motor without introducing excessive fluid drag on the
rotating components.

US Patent 5,751,082: High starting torque induction motor by Umesh C.

Gupta, Vickers, Inc. May 12, 1998. A modern motor with high initial
torque.

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