Electric Motors 

By on

Electrical motors are one of the most common items of electrical equipment in service today.  From toys and household appliances to the largest machines on the planet electric motors are used.  Motors as the single biggest users are estimated to account for between 43 and 46% of total global electricity use[1].

Given the widespread use of motors, it is not surprising that many of the posts on myElectrical deal with this topic.  This note is a collection of links to many of our motor notes and a few external resources.  I’ll try and return to the page every now and again to update it with any new notes which are added to the site.

Internal (myElectrical) Links

Induction Motor Calculator Tool – does motor calculations and provided a formulae reference

Motor Starting Time Tool - calculate the approximate starting time for asynchronous motors

Understanding electric motor insulation & temperature - in easy to understand form

How to Calculate Motor Starting Time Post – post which explains how to do this

Understanding Motor Duty Rating Post – explains IEC duty ratings

8 Motor parts and common faults Post – list of common motor faults

Motor Starting – Introduction – introduction to motor starting

Other Notes Articles

The internal links were last updated June 2015.  If your reading this note later, it may be worth using the site search to look for additional information which may have been added.

External Links

The following links are external to myElectrical and provided for reference only.

What is an electric motor? –  find the answer on answers.com

Basic motor theory -  ac motor, dc motor and generator theory

Electric Motor – Wikipedia's article on electric motors in general

AC motor – Wikipedia’s article (types of motor, history and some theory)

AC Industrial Electric Motors – RS datasheet (pdf download)

Two Speed Motors – a primer on two speed motors (motorsandrives.com)



Steven McFadyen's avatar Steven McFadyen

Steven has over twenty five years experience working on some of the largest construction projects. He has a deep technical understanding of electrical engineering and is keen to share this knowledge. About the author

myElectrical Engineering

comments powered by Disqus



Write your best report

Years ago I was told that you should always try to write the best report you can.  Many years later I still think on this as one of the better pieces of...

Welcome back Bottle

‘Kept looking at a card, y’see? Kept looking at it. Welcome back Bottle. Gods below welcome home. The Crippled God A Tale of the Malazan Book of the...

Low Voltage Switchroom Design Guide

Low voltage (LV) switchrooms are common across all industries and one of the more common spatial requirements which need to be designed into a project...

Frame Leakage Protection

While not as popular as it once was, frame leakage protection does still have some use in some circumstances.  In essence frame leakage is an earth fault...

How D.C. to A.C. Inverters Work

Traditionally generation of electricity has involved rotating machines to produce alternating sinusoidal voltage and current (a.c. systems). With the development...

Electromagnetic Fields - Exposure Limits

Exposure to time varying magnetic fields, from power frequencies to the gigahertz range can have harmful consequences.  A lot of research has been conducted...

IEC 61439 Verification Methods

The (relatively new) switchgear and control gear standard, IEC 61439 'Low-voltage switchgear and controlgear assemblies' has three methods which can be...

Random Numbers

Using laser optical pulses the random number generator utilizes the time between arrival of random photos to generate the numbers, ensuring true accuracy...

Why is electricity so hard to understand?

It's been a busy few months on different projects or busy couple of decades depending on how I look at it. I can say that on the odd (frequent) occasion...

Useful Motor Technical Information

Sometimes it’s useful to be able to quickly lookup a piece of technical information.  This note is a collection of information related to motors, and in...

Have some knowledge to share

If you have some expert knowledge or experience, why not consider sharing this with our community.  

By writing an electrical note, you will be educating our users and at the same time promoting your expertise within the engineering community.

To get started and understand our policy, you can read our How to Write an Electrical Note