What is a Medium Voltage (MV) AC Drive (Frequency Inverter)?
What is a Medium Voltage (MV) AC Drive (Frequency Inverter)?
Don’t feel bad about being confused by “medium voltage drives” terminology. It’s a confusing because it sounds like a technical term, but really it’s marketing driven. Actually, there are two terms that can be confusing to anyone new to the field of automated control of electric motors.
Let us start with the word “drive.” Also sometimes called an inverter, a drive is essentially a power amplifier that puts out the electric power needed by an electric motor based on the torque and/or speed called for by the controller, which is a digital computer tasked with overall system control. As the industry has shifted in favor of variable-speed drives, the role of the drive has become more important.
Variable-speed motor/drive combinations use a synchronous ac motor with an encoder built in. The encoder signals the motor’s speed and phase angle to the drive, which must then match its output frequency to the motor speed and its output phase to produce the required torque.
To get the drive’s power efficiently out to the load as mechanical power requires having enough voltage to drive enough current through the motor. The output power is, after all, the product of voltage times current. The ratio of the voltage to the current, on the other hand, defines an impedance for the drive/motor combination.






