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Investigation and mitigation of the adverse effects of PWM adjustable speed drives

With the introduction of high speed semiconductor power devices and the
increased application of adjustable speed drives (ASDs) for efficient speed control of ac
motors, there has been a growing number of costly motor-drive related process failures. It
has been found that the high dv/dt and high switching frequency have caused premature
motor insulation failures due to motor terminal over-voltages (exacerbated by longer
cable lengths). It is also acknowledged that high dv/dt and high frequency common-mode
voltages generated by pulse-width modulated (PWM) inverters contribute significantly to
electromagnetic interference (EMI) and may also cause damaging bearing and leakage
currents. In response to these problems, a variety of mitigation techniques have been
proposed in the past. However, the known solutions usually address these problems one
at a time and some of the mitigation techniques are not highly effective.
The major objective of this research is to search for solutions to these ASD
application issues with an emphasis on solving all of the problems at the source.
Therefore, theoretical analysis of all the above adverse effects are presented and the
existing mitigation techniques are evaluated in this dissertation. It is found that common-mode
voltage is the major cause of both bearing currents and the conducted EMI, thus the
research is focused on new inverter topologies and control strategies in order to eliminate
the common-mode voltage. To achieve the goal of common-mode voltage cancellation, a
novel dual-bridge inverter (DBI) is proposed and studied. The DBI employs an additional
inverter output stage to drive a standard three-phase dual-voltage induction motor and is
controlled to generate balanced excitation of the motor resulting in a zero common-mode
voltage. It is shown through experimental results that the motor bearing current is
eliminated and the conducted EMI is significantly reduced.
In addition to the DBI, multilevel inverter topologies have also been studied. It
has been found in this research that with proper selections of the switching states, certain
multilevel PWM inverters will not generate common-mode voltages. This new control
method is verified in simulation by using both sine-triangle intersection PWM (SPWM)
and voltage space-vector modulation (SVM). / Graduation date: 1999

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:ORGSU/oai:ir.library.oregonstate.edu:1957/33241
Date15 December 1998
CreatorsZhang, Haoran
Contributorsvon Jouanne, Annette
Source SetsOregon State University
Languageen_US
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis/Dissertation

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