Proceedings of the Second International conference on I-SMAC (IoT in Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud) (I-SMAC 2018)

IEEE Xplore Part Number:CFP18OZV-ART; ISBN:978-1-5386-1442-6

Remote Monitoring and Control of VFD fed Three

Phase Induction Motor with PLC and LabVIEW
software

Pavithra. G Mr. Vinayak. V. Rao

M.Tech Student: Department of Electrical Engineering Assistant Professor: Department of Electrical Engineering
M.S. Ramaiah Institute of Technology M.S. Ramaiah Institute of Technology
Bangalore, India-560054 Bangalore, India-560054
[email protected] [email protected]

Abstract— In today’s competitive market, industries are facing wireless-data-communication is used in various industries [2].
the growing demands-for improving process efficiencies, comply The introduction of variable speed drives increases the
with the environmental-regulations-and to meet corporate financial automation-and productivity in the process-efficiency. The
objectives. The dynamic industrial manufacturing market, intelligent Variable Frequency Drive (VFD) is fed with an induction
and low cost industrial automation systems-are required to improve
their productivity and efficiency. There is a need for cost effective
motor in which the .speed of the motor can be varied from
wireless automation system-which are secured and flexible. So in this zero to line frequency [3]. Many-factories use Programmable
regard the present work aims at remote monitoring and control of Logic Controllers (PLCs) in automation-processes to
electrical parameters such as speed, current of Variable Frequency minimize-production cost with increase in quality and
Drive (VFD) fed-three phase Induction Motor with Programmable - reliability [4].
Logic Controller (PLC) and LabVIEW software. The LabVIEW A complex design with remote control of industrial
Graphical User Interface (GUI) act like server communicates with the parameter requires traditionally more hardware and flexibility
remote authorized client and can access motor parameters via in design. So with the advent of technology, LabVIEW
Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). A simulation program have easily made the complex engineering
hardware setup and an algorithm has been developed in PLC and design with less hardware requirement and flexibility in
Arduino module for acquisition of current and speed data of three- implementation because the entire design is implemented in
phase Induction Motor. The speed and rotational directional control- software programming paradigm. LabVIEW is commonly
of induction motor is achieved through PLC programming. Object used in industry, including control of VFD fed induction
linking and Embedding for Process Control (OPC) server is used as
motor drive system. It has a feature called web publishing tool
an-interface to communicate PLC with LabVIEW software.
which helps to create internet based automation and control of
Keywords— LabVIEW, three phase induction motor, VFD, electric motors. Thus, designing distance control machinery is
PLC, NI-OPC Server, TCP/IP. now possible, even by using internet as the communication
medium between the computer and induction motor [5].
Establishing communication for real time monitoring and
I. INTRODUCTION control of machines is a challenging task. Various techniques
In an industrial environment, mechanical systems-driven have been developed for establishing communication between
by electric motors are used in most-production processes, PLC and LabVIEW. The most popular ones are open platform
communication for exchanging data between field and
accounting for more than two-thirds of industry electricity
networked devices [6].
consumption. Three phase Induction Motors are widely
employed in industries due to its cost effectiveness, high The. various techniques for remote monitoring and control
reliability, high efficiency and mechanical robustness [1]. of motors have been presented. The Industrial wireless sensor
Current and speed data of induction motor are very important networks (IWSN) technologies such as ZigBee,
for a drive system and performance of an induction motor is Ultrawideband (UWB) communication and Bluetooth based
directly-affected by these fundamental-quantities. Hence implementation transmits high data rates with low power,
monitoring and control of induction motor is essential to avoid good security characteristics but it cannot serve high number
disasters in critical production process. However, during of nodes and inability to cope with the multipath environment
continuous process of production it becomes risky and [7]. Embedded system integrated with Wireless Sensor
dangerous to-control the machines manually. In such cases, Networks (WSN) to control the speed of induction motor has
remote control and monitoring-techniques become a been implemented [1]. However, due to difficulty in data
considerable solution to-eliminate these hazards. Hence, transfer from one system to another it is not a scalable system

978-1-5386-1442-6/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE 329

 Proceedings of the Second International conference on I-SMAC (IoT in Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud) (I-SMAC 2018)
IEEE Xplore Part Number:CFP18OZV-ART; ISBN:978-1-5386-1442-6

of monitoring the induction motor. A Global System for continuously monitors the inputs and activates the outputs
Mobile Communication (GSM) based wireless communication according to the designed program. The ladder programming
using Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) technique to control in PLC continuously monitors the current sensor input through
the speed of induction motor remotely has been developed in analog inputs and speed variation of motor is attained through
[8] but has a limitation of low speed communication. Multiple VFD module (V/f technique) connected to analog output of
channels of Radio Frequency (RF) based wireless systems has PLC. PLC communicates with number of I/O devices through
been implementated for speed and direction control of AC/DC a physical connection and a shared protocol. In this work,
motors [9]. Modbus ASCII is used for communicating PLC with OPC
An efficient system to control three phase induction motor which connects to LabVIEW.
based on PLC and SCADA technology has been implemented
B. LabVIEW
[10]. However this system is complex in terms of hardware
units and is a dependent modules. The phase control technique LabVIEW stands for Laboratory of Virtual Instrumentation
for speed variation of induction motor has been developed Engineering Workbench and-provides simple interface to
using Arduino module which is reliable [11]. A Ethernet devices. The Graphical programming (G programming) code
module based remote control of industrial motor is is used-in LabVIEW software. It executes the user designed
implemented using LabVIEW which provides high speed and program based on the structure of graphical-block diagram.
low latency [12],[13],[14] but is restricted to limited Hence it is also referred as dataflow programming.
interfaces. Most of these communication systems are easily Shared variable is a library function-that allows sharing of
affected by bad weather conditions such as snow, fog and rain. data between various applications across a network.
In the above mentioned methods due to interminant Integration with National-Instrument (NI) hardware and web
connection between communication modules, there is service feature of LabVIEW makes monitoring and control of
production loss and waste of power in process control systems through web. The excellent feature of-LabVIEW
industries. The objectives of work are defined as: creates web server by automatically generating an URL that
 An algorithm has been developed in Programmable Logic helps in publishing the front panel of project over internet.
Controller (PLC) for current monitoring and speed control For receiving the signals from PLC to LabVIEW, OPC
of three phase induction motor. (Object Linking and Embedding for Process Control) has been
used. This provides an interface between PLC and LabVIEW.
 Speed monitoring algorithm has been implemented using
Arduino software.
C. OPC protocol
 A graphical user interface has been developed in
LabVIEW software with TCP/IP connection for remote The acronym for OPC-stands for Object-Linking and
speed control in forward/reverse direction, current and Embedding (OLE) for Process-Control. The OPC is an open
speed monitor of three phase induction motor. process protocol in which different application can
communicate through its network. OPC provides
Multiplatform Integration (MPI) which connects different
II. OVERVIEW OF THE SYSTEM software like SCADA, LabVIEW, PLC, and Microsoft Visual
The block-diagram of remote-monitoring and control of Basic. Therefore, OPC will work as server and client. The
three phase induction-motor is shown in Fig.1. It consists of status of PLC is monitored in real time by NI-OPC Quick
PLC, VFD, LabVIEW and Arduino controller. Client available in NI-OPC server tool.
PLC and NI-OPC server communicates with Modbus
ASCII protocol which runs on RS-232 cable. Users can setup
the server and create variable tags that can be directly linked
to PLC’s data registers. These variable tags are called OPC
tags. In LabVIEW, the program can be a designed using
shared variable through I/O server which creates a direct link
to OPC tags. I/O server automatically updates LabVIEW with
the current OPC tag value. This creates availability of
accessing all registers in PLC program from any OPC client
software.
D. Arduino Controller
Arduino is open source and easy to use hardware and
software. It is a ATmega328P based microcontroller board.
Fig. 1. Block diagram for remote monitoring and control of induction motor The user designed program in Arduino controller continuously
drive system. monitors the speed sensor and displays the value in user
A. Programmable Logic Controller readable form. It uses a set of C/C++ instructions for coding.
Arduino microcontroller has inherent analog-to-digital
A Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) is a specialized
convertor (ADC) and other peripherals devices for processing
computer used to control machines and process. PLC
the signal. The analog signal is given to Arduino ADC pins

978-1-5386-1442-6/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE 330

 Proceedings of the Second International conference on I-SMAC (IoT in Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud) (I-SMAC 2018)
IEEE Xplore Part Number:CFP18OZV-ART; ISBN:978-1-5386-1442-6

then converted into a digital quantity and further processed in A. PLC program
the microcontroller. The processed signal from the The software continuously monitors the three phase current
microcontroller is sent to computer through Universal Serial of induction motor. Fig. 3 shows the flowchart of current
Bus (USB) serial port. The processed signal is accessed in monitor software. PLC senses the output voltage of current
LabVIEW for computational and graphical representation. sensor and internally subtracts it from the reference voltage
2.5 V of current sensor. The processed value will be displayed
III. HARDWARE IMPLEMENTATION
on LabVIEW GUI.
The hardware system which is shown in Fig. 2 consists of a Fig. 4 illustrates the flowchart of speed control software in
FC-33 infrared speed sensor, three ACS712 hall-effect type PLC. The software regulates the speed regardless of torque
current sensors to measure the parameters of 0.5 hp/2750 rpm, variation. The VFD being the power supply for the induction
1.03/1.6 A, 410/240 V, two pole squirrel cage rotor type three motor executes the speed control action which is controlled by
phase induction motor. Delta Electronics VFD-M series, three- PLC software. As the control panel of LabVIEW is varied, the
phase, 0.75kW, 0.1- 400Hz, 380-480V module is used to drive corresponding digital values are taken as input to the PLC.
a motor along with the Delta Electronics DVP20EX200R This PLC internally converts into analog voltage and this
series PLC module for current monitoring and speed control. signal is fed to VFD to achieve the speed control of motor
An ATmega328T microprocessor based Arduino controller through V/f technique. The forward/reverse direction and
has been used for speed monitoring of induction motor. stopping of motor is also achieved through LabVIEW GUI
Voltage regulator LM-7805 IC provides 5V constant output through PLC. The developed ladder logic program in PLC for
voltage from fluctuating voltage sources. current monitoring and speed control of VFD fed three phase
induction motor is shown in Fig. 5.

Fig. 3. Flowchart of the current monitor software.

Fig. 2. Schematic diagram of hardware implementation.

IV. SOFTWARE IMPLEMENTATION

The Software design for remote monitoring and the control
of three phase induction motor is achieved in LabVIEW using
graphical language. However current monitoring and speed
control program is designed in PLC (WPL Soft) using ladder
logic. Speed monitoring program is designed in Arduino
software using C/C++ instructions.
Fig. 4. Flowchart of the speed control software.

978-1-5386-1442-6/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE 331

 Proceedings of the Second International conference on I-SMAC (IoT in Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud) (I-SMAC 2018)
IEEE Xplore Part Number:CFP18OZV-ART; ISBN:978-1-5386-1442-6

which is shown in Fig. 7. The highlighted icons are the

controls taken from PLC data registers through OPC tags.
The Vision and Motion control feature in function palette of
LabVIEW allows web-camera interfacing for live stream
video of industrial environment. Virtual Instrument Software
Architecture (VISA) resource in LabVIEW software
communicates with the Arduino-controller using USB port for
speed monitoring of three phase induction motor.
Table I. Details of OPC tags and its connection to VFD through PLC

Fig. 5. Ladder logic for current monitoring, start/stop, forward/reverse and

speed control.

B. NI-OPC server
NI-OPC tags are created using Modbus address for each
data registers to sense the phase currents, start/stop,
forward/reverse direction control and speed control of motor
which is shown in Fig. 6. These OPC tags communicate with
PLC to control the above mentioned action through VFD to
the motor. The details of OPC tags and its connection to VFD
through PLC are summarized in Table I.
OPC tags description:
 Analog_out tag control the speed of induction motor.
 Enable_vfd tag (Y0) switches the VFD to drive the
induction motor.
 Forrev tag (M4) provides direction control of
induction motor.
 Phase1_current, phase2_current, phase3_current tags
(D1, D2, D3 respectively) provide the three phase
current of induction motor.
 Start tag (M0) is used to start the motor
 Status_indicator tag (M2) indicates the rotational
direction of induction motor.
 Stop tag (M1) stops the induction motor.
All these tags are accessed in LabVIEW using shared variable.

Fig. 6. OPC tags in NI-OPC server.

Fig. 7. Block diagram panel code for monitoring and control of motor
parameters.
C. LabVIEW software
D. Arduino controller
Using a shared variable in LabVIEW, the start, stop, status
indicator, forward/reverse, phase currents and speed control The flow chart for speed monitoring of motor is shown in
actions are implemented with PLC data registers and OPC tags Fig. 8. Following are the steps involved in writing a Arduino
program for speed monitoring:

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 Proceedings of the Second International conference on I-SMAC (IoT in Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud) (I-SMAC 2018)
IEEE Xplore Part Number:CFP18OZV-ART; ISBN:978-1-5386-1442-6

1. Define the baud rate of 9600 bits/s for Arduino GUI. The hardware setup has been developed as shown in Fig.
controller. 9.
2. Define the digital PWM pin number 2 as input which Fig. 10 shows the front panel screen of LabVIEW which
receives signal from speed sensor. provides various controls and indicators for motor start/stop,
3. Set the timer for 1 second which monitors the speed reverse/forward direction and speed control knob. The
for every 1 second. parameters like speed and current of three phase induction
4. Assign the initial count value to zero. motor is also displayed on front panel screen of LabVIEW.
5. Define the type of pulse as rising edge pulse.
6. Start the timer for speed monitoring. When start push button is pressed, the motor starts rotating
7. Increment the count value for each rising pulse. in forward direction (which is default direction set by PLC)
8. Convert the count value into rpm. and forward/reverse switch is moved to change the rotating
9. Display the speed of the induction motor when direction of three phase induction motor in reverse direction.
operating at maximum frequency. Speed control knob is used to vary the analog voltage signal
10. Display the motor speed in rpm. (0-10V DC) at inverter output of VFD which varies the
11. Reinitialize the counter value and start the timer. switching rate of IGBT based inverter, hence the speed of
three phase squirrel cage induction motor is controlled.
VFD

Current sensor

Speed sensor
Miniature
Circuit
Breaker ARDUINO-UNO-R3
BOARD

PLC

Fig. 9. Experimental setup of the system.

Fig. 10. Front panel of the LabVIEW.

A. System result for remote speed and current monitoring

Fig. 8. Flow chart of Speed Monitoring.
Fig. 11 (a) and (b) shows the variation of speed (rpm) and
The software is uploaded in the Arduino board with baud current (ampere) versus time in LabVIEW GUI front panel. As
rate of 9600 bits/second to monitor the speed and display it in the speed control knob is varied from 0 to 50 Hz in front panel
LabVIEW GUI using VISA resource through USB serial port. of LabVIEW the speed and current of the induction motor is
varied from 0 to 2750 rpm and 0.5 to 0.65 A respectively
under no-load.
V. EXPERIMENTAL SETUP AND RESULTS
The experiment is conducted on three phase squirrel cage
induction motor for remote monitoring and control of its
parameters like speed, direction and current using LabVIEW

978-1-5386-1442-6/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE 333

 Proceedings of the Second International conference on I-SMAC (IoT in Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud) (I-SMAC 2018)
IEEE Xplore Part Number:CFP18OZV-ART; ISBN:978-1-5386-1442-6

The processed value is displayed on LabVIEW screen through

OPC tag using shared variable engine. The graph of frequency
versus speed and current for a set of readings under no-load
are shown in Fig. 12 (a) and (b). The rotor speed is always less
than the synchronous speed of rotating magnetic field to keep
the motor in rotating condition.

(a) From the plot of frequency versus speed and current, it is

observed that change in frequency from 0-50 Hz changes the
speed of the induction motor from standstill to full speed. The
variation in frequency varies the rotor resistance in induction
motor. Hence, the current increase as the frequency is
increased maintaining the V/f ratio constant under no-load.
B. System result for remote speed control
Fig. 13 shows speed control knob in front panel of LabVIEW.

(b)

Fig. 11. Speed and current monitoring at 50 Hz under no-load. (a) Speed
versus time graph. (c) Current versus time graph.

Arduino controller counts the number of digital pulses

generated in speed sensor and converts it into revolution per
minute (rpm) which is displayed on LabVIEW screen using
Virtual Instrument Software Architecture (VISA) resource in Fig. 13. Speed control knob.
LabVIEW. Current sensor measure the input current in each
phase of induction motor and produces the output voltage The variation of speed control knob in LabVIEW changes
which is fed to PLC for processing. the corresponding analog voltage of range 0 to 10 V DC in
PLC which is then fed to VFD. The analog voltage switches
the IGBT transistors at the inverter output of VFD to regulate
the frequency and voltage using PWM technique. Hence a
smooth start up is achieved by reducing the analog voltage
signal which prevents the starting inrush current to motor.
C. System result for remote direction control
Fig. 14 shows forward/reverse switch knob for changing
the direction of rotation of three phase induction motor in the
front panel of LabVIEW.

(a)

Fig. 14. Forward/reverse switching knob.

PLC has two magnetic contactors for forward and reverse

connection of motor which are interlocked with each other.
The command signal for direction control entered in
LabVIEW energizes the corresponding magnetic contactor in
PLC through OPC tag. The signal command is then fed to
inverter section of VFD that changes the sequence in which
IGBTs are triggered. This reverses the phase supply to motor
and hence the motor rotational direction changes. When the
motor is switched to reverse direction, the forward rotating
(b) motor take seconds to come down to its rest state and switch
Fig. 12. Speed and current graph (a) Plot of Frequency versus speed. (b) Plot to reverse direction.
of Frequency versus current.

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 Proceedings of the Second International conference on I-SMAC (IoT in Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud) (I-SMAC 2018)
IEEE Xplore Part Number:CFP18OZV-ART; ISBN:978-1-5386-1442-6

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