The purpose of this thesis was to explore the behavior in power sharing and control of Hybrid Motor Drives. In this research, a solar-based hybrid adjustable-speed pump, which has been developed in the laboratory, was used to investigate the power-sharing in hybrid (dual-input) motor-drive systems. The laboratory test setup contained a DC-DC module connected to the DC-bus capacitors of a 2.5hp 230V PWM-based adjustable-speed motor-drive. The experimental results demonstrate that the power-sharing of a Photovoltaic (PV) array/DC-DC converter is not a function of motor speed in hybrid solar-based motor-drives, as long as the power contribution of the AC-grid stays above zero. In these conditions, the PV-DC-DC module behaves like a current source, and the dynamic behavior of the motor is decoupled from the dynamic behavior of the AC-grid, given that the PV-DC-DC module can provide the motor load.

This thesis presents a unified nonlinear optimization based speed and position estimation method in position sensorless control of interior permanent magnet synchronous motor (IPMSM) drives at wide speed range including standstill. The existing electromotive force (EMF) based sensorless methods are suitable for medium and high speed operation, but they can't be applied at low speed and standstill condition due to the reduced EMF values. The conventional saliency tracking based sensorless methods usually employ the continuous voltage or current injection at low speed including standstill condition. However, these methods degrade at high speed by introducing higher loss and torque ripples caused by the injection. Additionally, the initial rotor position needs to be detected at the machine startup to avoid the reverse rotation and to guarantee the delivery of the expected torque. Therefore, different position estimation techniques need to be combined in the controller at wide speed range, which increases the control system complexity. Hence, a unified nonlinear optimization based speed and position estimation method is proposed. At startup and standstill conditions, three steps are employed for initial position estimation. Step I employs pulse voltage injection in the stationary reference frame and a cost function which contains the knowledge of initial rotor position. The rotor position can be estimated by minimizing the cost function with injected voltage and induced current. Since the estimation results in Step I have an ambiguity of 180 degree, a generalized approach to magnetic polarity detection which exploits asymmetries in machine specific differential inductance profiles is employed as Step II. In order to improve the estimation accuracy, continuous sinusoidal voltage is injected in estimated rotor reference frame in Step III. A modified cost function is minimized based on the injected voltage and resulting current. At running state, cost functions which employ both speed and position as decision variables are proposed and utilized for estimation. The speed and position estimation can be delivered by minimizing the proposed cost functions based on the measurements of the stator voltage and current. Since only one position estimator exists in the drive system, the speed and position estimation is unified at wide speed range. The feasibility of the proposed estimation algorithms is validated with the prototype 5 KW IPMSM drives test bench. In order to benchmark the proposed estimation method, the performance of the proposed method was compared with existing sensorless control methods on the same prototype IPMSM drives test bench. Under the same test conditions, the proposed method outperforms with improved transient performance and steady state accuracy. Moreover, the proposed method is capable of delivering estimation with different voltage injection types and involving the nonlinear motor parameters, which makes this method more flexible in practice. Additionally, the capability of estimating speed and position with low sampling frequency also makes the application of the proposed method promising in high power AC motor drive systems. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Τα κινητήρια συστήματα των χαρτοποιητικών μηχανών που παράγουν τα λεπτά χαρτιά (tissue), σύμφωνα με τα εμπειρικά στοιχεία, παρουσιάζουν διάφορα ηλεκτρικά και μηχανικά προβλήματα, τα οποία μπορούν να αποδοθούν στις μεθόδους που χρησιμοποιούνται για το μέχρι τώρα σχεδιασμό τους. Η παρούσα διατριβή στοχεύει στην επίλυση των προβλημάτων αυτών. Τα προβλήματα αυτά είναι η άνιση κατανομή του μηχανικού φορτίου μεταξύ των δύο κινητήρων του ιδίου τμήματος, η υπερφόρτωση του ενός εκ των δύο κυρίων τμημάτων της χαρτοποιητικής μηχανής και η πλήρης διακοπή της λειτουργίας της, και η εμφάνιση φαινομένων μηχανικού συντονισμού ή ενίσχυσης των ροπών των αξόνων που οδηγούν στην καταστροφή του πολυκινητηρίου συστήματος. Για την επίτευξη του στόχου γίνεται ανάλυση των σημερινών δομών των πολυκινητηρίων συστημάτων των χαρτοποιητικών μηχανών λεπτών χαρτιών και αναδεικνύονται τα προβλήματα των. Προτείνεται η αλλαγή της δομής και νέος σχεδιασμός του πολυκινητήριου συστήματος των χαρτοποιητικών μηχανών λεπτών. Γίνεται ανάλυση του κινητηρίου συστήματος του στεγνωτικού τυμπάνου με δύο κινητήρες συνεχούς ρεύματος με κοινό μηχανικό φορτίο και εξομοίωση με MATLAB/SIMULINK χωρίς ελαστικούς άξονες. Εξετάζεται η συμπεριφορά του συστήματος αυτού με ελαστικούς άξονες μέσω εξομοίωσης. Προτείνεται μία μέθοδος ελέγχου για την κατανομή του συνολικού φορτίου στο πολυκινητήριο σύστημα και γίνεται ανάλυση της στατικής και της δυναμικής συμπεριφοράς μέσω εξομοίωσης. Επίσης εξετάζεται η ορθότητα της μεθόδου ελέγχου στην περίπτωση σφαλμάτων σε μία γέφυρα τροφοδοσίας. Για την αντιμετώπιση των μηχανικών προβλημάτων που ανακύπτουν γίνεται διεξοδική ανάλυση ταλαντώσεων. Χρησιμοποιώντας τον προτεινόμενο σχεδιασμό και τις προτεινόμενες μεθόδους ελέγχου επιτυγχάνεται κατανομή του μηχανικού φορτίου σύμφωνα με την ονομαστική ισχύ των κινητήρων μέσα στο ίδιο τμήμα και αντιμετωπίζεται πλήρως η υπερφόρτιση του ενός από τα δύο κύρια τμήματα της μηχανής και έτσι αποφεύγεται η πλήρης διακοπή της λειτουργίας της. Από την ανάλυση των ταλαντώσεων προκύπτει η δυνατότητα να δίνονται κατευθυντήριες γραμμές για την επιλογή των καταλλήλων κινητήρων και των καταλλήλων αξόνων, δηλ. τη σωστή διαστασιολόγιση του συστήματος. / The drive systems of tissue paper machines present various electrical and mechanical problems according to empirical data, which can be attributed to the used design methods. The present thesis aims at solving of such problems. The problems are: the partial treatment of the load sharing in sections, where two motors drive the same mechanical load, the overloading of one of the two main sections of the machine and the interruption of its operation when these sections are mechanically engaged. Concerning the mechanical part of the drive, problems arise due to torsional oscillations created by the resonance phenomena or the shafts torque amplification. In order to achieve the aim, an analysis is carried out of the current structure of the drive systems and the problems due to this structure are brought out. A modified structure and a new design of the drive system are proposed. A control method is proposed to share the load between the two DC motors of the same section and investigation, analysis and simulation of a drive are carried out. The behavior of the drive with elastic shafts is examined. In order to face the overloading of one of the two main sections of the paper machine, a control method is proposed to share the total load to the two main sections of the machine and an analysis of the steady state and dynamic behavior through simulation is carried out. The correctness of this control method is examined in the case of typical faults in one of the power converters. In order to face the mechanical problems an exhaustive analysis is carried out concerning torsional oscillations. Using the proposed design and control methods, the load sharing, according to the nominal power of the motors, is assured for the sections where two motors drive the same mechanical load. The overloading of one of the two sections is completely faced and the interruption of the machine operation is avoided. Torsional oscillations analysis emerges that guidelines can be given for the selection of suitable shafts and motors, namely the correct dimensioning of the system.

Motor drives represent electric equipment used for speed control of electric motors. Varieties of industrial applications, such as assembly, pumps, fans etc., require motors and they consume huge amount of electric energy. Compared with traditional motor drives, which can only send energy from grid to motor, a regenerative motor drive can achieve bi-directional power flow control between motors and utility grid. Regenerative motor drives are excellent candidates for reducing power loss in motor-related applications. One of the most essential parts of a regenerative motor drive power cell is dc-link capacitors. They create suitable dc-link voltages and smooth the voltage waveforms. Reliability, or lifetime of dc-link capacitors highly affect power cell lifetime, and power loss in dc-link capacitor is also another issue that worth noticing. This thesis focuses on the lifetime modeling and lifetime improvement of dc-link capacitors in a regenerative cascaded H-bridge medium-voltage motor drive. The lifetime modeling bases itself on the mechanisms of dominant lifetime stresses in practical operations. A proposed method is used to reduce a dominant current harmonic component in dc-link capacitors. With the proposed lifetime model and harmonic-reduction method, dc-link capacitor lifetime improvement can be anticipated in this motor drive model. Less power losses in those dc-link capacitor banks can also be achieved. / Thesis / Master of Applied Science (MASc)

No description available.

In this thesis, advanced control methods are presented for torque ripple reduction and performance improvement in switched reluctance motor (SRM) drives. Firstly, a comparative evaluation of power electronic converters including asymmetric, N+1, C dump, split AC, and split DC converters is presented for three-phase SRMs in terms of cost, efficiency and control performance. Secondly, two methods are proposed using torque sharing function (TSF) concepts for torque ripple reduction of SRM over a wide speed range. An offline TSF is proposed to minimize the copper loss and the absolute rate of change of flux linkage (ARCFL) with a Tikhonov factor. Then an online TSF is proposed by adding a proportional and integral compensator with torque error to torque reference of the phase with lower ARCFL. Therefore, the total torque of online TSF is determined by the phase with lower ARCFL rather than the phase with higher ARCFL as in conventional TSFs. The maximum torque-ripple-free speed (TRFS) of the offline TSF and online TSF is validated to be 7 times and 10 times as high as the best case in these conventional TSFs, respectively. Thirdly, two methods are proposed to eliminate mutual flux effect on rotor position estimation of SRM drives without a prior knowledge of mutual flux, one is the variable-hysteresis-band current control for the incoming-phase self-inductance estimation and the other is variable-sampling outgoing-phase self-inductance estimation. Compared with the conventional method which neglects the mutual flux effect, the proposed position estimation method demonstrates an improvement in position estimation accuracy by 2º. Fourthly, a fixed-switching-frequency integral sliding mode current controller for SRM drives is presented, which demonstrates high dynamics, strong robustness and none steady-state error. All the proposed control methods are verified by both simulations and experiments with a 2.3 kW, 6000 rpm, three-phase 12/8 SRM operating in both linear magnetic and saturated magnetic regions. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis deals with a new solution for medium voltage drives. Load Commutated Inverter (LCI) fed synchronous motor drive is a popular solution for high power drive applications. Though the induction machine is more rugged and cheaper compared to the synchronous machine, LCI fed induction motor drive solution is not available. The basic advantage of a synchronous machine over an induction machine is the fact that the synchronous machine can operate at leading power factor. Due to this property load commutation of SCR switches of the LCI is achievable for synchronous machine. On the contrary an induction machine always draws lagging power factor current; this makes it unsuitable as a drive motor for LCI technology. In this thesis a new LCI fed induction motor drive configuration is developed as an alternative for synchronous motor drives. A new variant of six phase induction motor is proposed in this context. The machine is named as Active Reactive Induction Machine (ARIM). The ARIM contains two sets of three-phase windings with isolated neutral. Both the windings have a common axis. One winding carries the active power and can be wound for higher voltage (say 11kV). The other winding supplies the total reactive power of the machine and can be wound for lower voltage (say 2.2 kV). The rotor is a standard squirrel cage. High power induction machines usually demand lesser magnitude of reactive power compared to the total power rating of the machine ( 20% ). Therefore excitation winding has a smaller fraction of the total machine rating compared to the power winding. A VSI with an LC filter supplies reactive power to the ARIM through the excitation winding and ensures leading power factor at the power winding. This is similar to the excitation control of the LCI fed synchronous machine. The direct VSI connection is possible due to the lower voltage rating for the excitation winding. In this way, the VSI voltage rating does not limit the highest motor voltage that can be handled. An LCI supplies the real power into the ARIM from the power winding. The LCI currents are quasi square wave in shape. Therefore they have rich low order harmonic content. They cause 6th and 12th harmonic torque pulsations in the machine. This is a problem for the LCI fed synchronous machine drive. In the proposed drive, the VSI can compensate these low frequency m.m.f. harmonics inside the machine air gap to remove torque pulsation and rotor harmonic losses. The advantage of the proposed topology is that no transformer is required to drive an 11kV machine. It is always desirable to feed sinusoidal voltage and current to both the power winding and the excitation winding. To address this problem, a second configuration is proposed. A low power three-level VSI is connected in shunt at the power winding with the proposed ARIM drive as discussed above. This VSI compensates the low frequency harmonic currents to achieve sinusoidal motor currents at the motor winding. This VSI acts as a shunt active filter and compensates for the lower order harmonics injected by the LCI. The proposed topologies have LC filters to maintain sinusoidal motor voltages and currents by absorbing the VSI switching frequency components. But the motor terminal voltage oscillates at system resonant frequency due to the presence of LC filters. These resonant components in the terminal voltages are required to be eliminated for smooth terminal voltages and safe load commutation of the thyristors. In this thesis a simple active damping method is proposed to mitigate these issues. The proposed topologies are experimentally verified with an ARIM with 415 V power winding and 220 V excitation winding. The control is carried out on a digital platform having a TMS 320LF 2407A DSP processor and an ALTERA CYCLONE FPGA processor. Results from the prototype experimental drive are presented to show the feasibility and performance of the proposed drive configurations.

Measurement-based behavioral electromagnetic interference (EMI) models have been shown earlier to accurately capture the EMI behavior of switched power converters. These models are compact, linear, and run in frequency domain, enabling faster and more stable simulations compared to the detailed lumped circuit models. So far, the behavioral EMI modeling techniques are developed and applied to the converter's input side only. The resulting models are therefore referred to as "terminated EMI models". Under the condition that the output side of the converter remains fixed, these models can predict the input side EMI for any change in the impedance of the input side network. However, any change at the output side would require re-extraction of the behavioral model. Thus the terminated EMI models are incapable of predicting the change in the input side EMI due to changes at the output side of the converter or vice versa. The above mentioned limitation has been overcome by an "un-terminated EMI model" proposed in this dissertation. Un-terminated EMI models are developed here to predict both the common-mode (CM) and the differential (DM) noise currents at the input and the output sides of a motor-drive system. The modeling procedure itself has been simplified and now requires fewer measurements and results in less noise in the identified model parameters. Both CM and DM models are then combined to predict the total noise in the motor drive system. All models are validated by experiments and their limitations identified. A significant portion of this dissertation is then devoted to the application of behavioral EMI models in the design of EMI filters. Comprehensive design procedures are developed for both DM and CM filters in a motor-drive system. The filters designed using the proposed methods are experimentally shown to satisfy the DO-160 conducted emissions standards. The dissertation ends with a summary of contributions, limitations, and some future research directions. / Ph. D.

Medium-voltage (MV) motor drives have found widespread applications in various heavy industries, such as in the oil and gas sectors, production plants, and process industries. Conventional cascaded H-bridge (CHB) multilevel inverters dominate the medium-voltage industrial drives domain due to their modularity, scalability, and reliability. The most prevalent CHB topology in the drive industry is based on the diodes-front-end (DFE) rectifier, which greatly limits the industrial application of the conventional CHB drives where the ability of handling regeneration is required. The main objective of this thesis is to develop a low-cost, high performance, reliable regenerative CHB drive. The thesis is concentrating on reducing the grid-tied filter size, shrinking the DC-link capacitors, improving the system’s performance and reliability through advanced control techniques. First, to reduce the number of passive filter components, a new sideband harmonic active filtering strategy based on the carrier-shifting method is proposed for regenerative CHB drives. This proposed approach extends the carrier shifted PWM method for regenerative CHB drives to further reduce the required passive filter size significantly and thus improves the overall size, cost, and efficiency while complying with IEEE Std 519-2014 grid standard. Second, a novel voltage ripple controller is proposed to reduce the dc-link capacitance in the three-phase regenerative CHB drive without adding extra measurements. Third, to achieve a faster dynamic response and the multi-objective performance during the control of CHB drives, a novel high-performance predictive control with long prediction horizons is proposed to improve the control performance of the CHB multilevel inverters. The formulation of the proposed high-performance finite control set model predictive control (FCS-MPC) is explained in detail and analyzed to reduce the real-time computation burden. Last, when a fault is detected in the regenerative CHB drive system, the reliability and fault-tolerant ability are considered as the main issues. To improve the drive system reliability, a non-symmetrical selective harmonic elimination (SHE) formulation is proposed to extend the output voltage range with a good harmonic profile under post-fault conditions. Experimental validation of the proposed algorithms is presented for the operation of a scaled-down seven-level regenerative CHB drive system. These proposed techniques make the regenerative CHB drive a promising solution for future medium-voltage regenerative drive applications in terms of cost, performance, and reliability. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

No description available.