Engineering design project : series 1

This book is a compilation of engineering design projects which illustrates a detail explanation on the design process including all tools and methods involved in each design stage. The presented projects have been selected to prepare engineering students with the adequate knowledge and skills required in organizing product based project, formulating problems, generating and evaluating alternatives, preparing technical documentation and considering the sustainable and economic constraints for the product development and realization stage using the integration of various disciplines in mechanical and manufacturing engineering. This book is generally suitable as a reference to project-oriented problem-based learning (POPBL) activities at engineering institutions

Imposed Switching Frequency Direct Torque Control of Induction Machine Using Five Level Flying Capacitors Inverter

The paper proposes a new control structure for sensorless induction motor drive based on a five-level voltage source inverter (VSI). The output voltages of the five-level VSI can be represented by nine groups. Then, the amplitude and the rotating velocity of the flux vector can be controlled freely. Both fast torque and optimal switching logic can be obtained. The selection is based on the value of the stator flux and the torque. This paper investigates a new control structure focused on controlling switching frequency and torque harmonics contents. These strategies, called ISFDTC, indeed combines harmoniously both these factors, without compromising the excellence of the dynamical performances typically conferred to standard DTC strategies. The validity of the proposed control technique is verified by Matlab/Simulink. Simulation results presented in this paper confirm the validity and feasibility of the proposed control approach and can be tested on experimental setup.Peer reviewe

Improved control strategy of DFIG-based wind turbines using direct torque and direct power control techniques

This paper presents different control strategies for a variable-speed wind energy conversion system (WECS), based on a doubly fed induction generator. Direct Torque Control (DTC) with Space-Vector Modulation is used on the rotor side converter. This control method is known to reduce the fluctuations of the torque and flux at low speeds in contrast to the classical DTC, where the frequency of switching is uncontrollable. The reference for torque is obtained from the maximum power point tracking technique of the wind turbine. For the grid-side converter, a fuzzy direct power control is proposed for the control of the instantaneous active and reactive power. Simulation results of the WECS are presented to compare the performance of the proposed and classical control approaches.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

High Performance Direct Torque Control of Induction Motor Drives: Problems and Improvements

This paper presents some of the main problems, as well as their root causes, of Direct Torque Control (DTC) 3-phase induction motor drive. The high torque ripple in DTC drive due to the hysteresis controller inevitably becomes worst with the discrete implementation of the drive system. The hysteresis controller also causes variable switching frequency that depends on operating conditions, especially the speed. The simplification used in stator flux expression for voltage vectors selection in flux control results in a poor flux regulation at low speed. To overcome these problems, techniques that have been implemented at UTM- PROTON Future Drive Laboratory (UPFDL) are presented and described. Some experimental results obtained from the previous works are also presented and discussed.

Snack food packaging features and consumer repeat purchase intent

The visual aspects of snack food packaging can influence repeat purchase intention. In today’s busy working lifestyle, snack food may replace one or more of the daily meals. Previous studies reported the inconsistent finding of characteristics of packaging with consumer repeat purchase intent. Thus, this study has been conducted to investigate the relationship between the characteristics of visual and verbal packaging for snacks with consumer repeat purchase intent. The study was conducted at a big supermarket located in the Johore State, Malaysia. The convenient purposive sampling was used to select the consumers who went shopping at the selected supermarket. A total of 217 survey questionnaires were distributed to collect the needed data. Data were analyzed descriptively, the central tendency (skewness), and regression. Overall, the outcome of this research shows the visual features of the snack food packaging is significantly related to consumer repeat purchase intent at p < 0.001. On the other hand, it was found that there is no association between the verbal packaging features with repeat purchase intent. This indicates that visual features are crucial to consumers in their snack food product selection. It is also possible that snacks (junk food) consumers may not be concerned with nutritional value. This could be in the context that such products are of lower involvement, where not much further information is needed. However, recommended that it needs further research in this case. In conclusion, manufacturers can focus on the visual packaging features of snack food product to attract their customers to buy their packed snack food product

Sensored and sensorless speed control methods for brushless doubly fed reluctance motors

The study considers aspects of scalar V/f control, vector control and direct torque (and flux) control (DTC) of the brushless doubly fed reluctance machine (BDFRM) as a promising cost-effective alternative to the existing technological solutions for applications with restricted variable speed capability such as large pumps and wind turbine generators. Apart from providing a comprehensive literature review and analysis of these control methods, the development and results of experimental verification, of an angular velocity observerbased DTC scheme for sensorless speed control of the BDFRM which, unlike most of the other DTC-concept applications, can perform well down to zero supply frequency of the inverter-fed winding, have also been presented in the study

An improved FPGA implementation of direct torque control for induction machines

This paper presents a novel direct torque control (DTC) approach for induction machines, based on an improved torque and stator flux estimator and its implementation using Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA). The DTC performance is significantly improved by the use of FPGA, which can execute the DTC algorithm at higher sampling frequency. This leads to the reduction of the torque ripple and improved flux and torque estimations. The main achievements are: i) calculating a discrete integration operation of stator flux using backward Euler approach, ii) modifying a so called non-restoring method in calculating the complicated square root operation in stator flux estimator, iii) introducing a new flux sector determination method, iv) increasing the sampling frequency to 200kHz such that the digital computation will perform similar to that of the analog operation, and v) using two’s complement fixed-point format approach to minimize calculation errors and the hardware resource usage in all operations. The design was achieved in VHDL, based on a Matlab/Simulink simulation model. The Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) method is used to verify the functionality of the FPGA estimator. The simulation results are validated experimentally. Thus, it is demonstrated that FPGA implementation of DTC drives can achieve excellent performance at high sampling frequency