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.

This thesis proposes control schemes and converter configurations for high power wound field synchronous motor (WFSM) drives. The model for a salient pole WFSM in any general rotating reference frame is developed which can be used to derive models along known rotor (dq) and stator flux (MT) reference frames. Based on these models, the principle of sensor-less stator flux oriented field-oriented control (FOC) for salient pole WFSM is developed. So far in the literature, control of cylindrical rotor machine only has been addressed and the effects of saliency have generally been neglected. The performance of the proposed sensor-less FOC has been demonstrated by experimentally operating a 15.8 HP salient pole WFSM using a three-level IGBT based voltage source inverter (VSI). The principle of FOC has been later extended to the control of current source load commutated inverter (LCI) fed salient pole WFSM drives, where the drawbacks present in conventional self-control method such as rigorous off-line calculation for generation of look up tables, coupling between flux and torque control etc. are eliminated. This thesis also proposes the combination of a VSI with the LCI power circuit to overcome the different disadvantages that are present in the existing LCI topology. Firstly, a novel starting scheme is proposed, where the LCI fed WFSM is started with the aid of a low power auxiliary VSI converter in a smooth manner with sinusoidal motor currents and voltages. This overcomes the difficulties of the present complex dc link current pulsing technique that has drawbacks such as pulsating torque, long starting time etc. In a second mode of operation, it is shown that the VSI can be connected to the existing LCI fed WFSM drive as a harmonic compensator in On-The-Fly mode; this will make the terminal stator current and voltage sinusoidal apart from cancellation of torque pulsations thus improving the drive performance. The above two schemes have potential as retrofit for existing drives. It is possible to combine both the advantages, mentioned above, by permanently connecting the VSI with the LCI power circuit to feed the WFSM. This proposed hybrid LCI/VSI drive can be regarded as a universal solution for high power synchronous motor drives at all power and speed ranges.