Development of a permanent magnet free piston compressor

Abstract

There is a high demand for refrigerators in South Africa, as revealed by the Eskom TSI market survey. Refrigerators are found to be expensive becoause compressors are imported and compressors cost 45% of the total budget of a refrigerator. For this reason a project was undertaken to develop an affrodable refrigirator but this was unsuccessful owing to expensive compressors. The compressor consists of an induction motor coupled to the compression unit via a crankshaft. In this thesis a novel permanent magnet free piston compressor is designed and constructed by using a linear motor topology.