Light weight induction motor

There are hundreds of sizes and types of motors on the market but for generating power that you can feed back onto the power grid I believe you should be looking for a synchronous motor. An induction motor would have to have a variable frequency fed to one of the sets of coils (rotor or stator) depending on the load, in order to generate a 60 Hz output in phase with the power company. It would be very complex and probably expensive to use such a system for an induction motor.

Joe,

An induction motor can backfeed on the grid by simply being torqued faster than the sysnchronous speed (4 pole is 1800 rpm on 60 hz grid). It does NOT need any complex anything...just a torque less than peak rated torque. That is the beauty of that beast. If you plug in your motor, let it come to speed, then troque it, you will slow your meter down. There is a lot more to it than that, but that is the gist of it.

You can also use induction for island grid generation WITHOUT synchronous motors by using capacitors Cmin<C<Cmax (I'm learning how to do that...). The micro grid frequency is the average of all the motor synchronous frequencies. To control the "grid" frequency (say to 60 hz) you have to control the prime mover speed as a function of the feedback loop of frequency, and NOT the speed of the motor, which will vary by load (slip).

Anybody good at power generation out there?

Seaplaneguy

cplainguy; you are right over speed the motor feeds power into the grid, may take some capacitor (s) we use this to break in IC engines, put a panel watt meter hooked up to read power in to grid. payback