Effect of State Feedback Coupling on the Design of Voltage Source Inverters for Standalone Applications

This Ph.D. thesis aims at investigating the effect of state feedback cross‐coupling decoupling of the capacitor voltage on the dynamics performance of Voltage Source Inverters for standalone microgrids/Uninterruptible Power Supply systems. Computation and PWM delays are the main factors which limit the achievable bandwidth of current regulators in digital implementations. In particular, the performance of state feedback decoupling is degraded because of these delays. Two decoupling techniques aimed at improving the transient response of voltage and current regulators are investigated, named nonideal and ideal capacitor voltage decoupling respectively. In particular, the latter solution consists in leading the capacitor voltage on the state feedback decoupling path in order to compensate for system delays. Practical implementation issues are discussed with reference to both the decoupling techniques. Moreover, different resonant regulators structures for the inner current loop are analysed and compared to investigate which is the most suitable for standalone microgrid applications. A design methodology for the voltage loop, which considers the closed loop transfer functions developed for the inner current loop, is also provided. Proportional resonant voltage controllers tuned at specific harmonic frequencies are designed according to the Nyquist criterion taking into account application requirements. For this purpose, a mathematical expression based on root locus analysis is proposed to find the minimum value of the resonant gain at the fundamental frequency. The exact model of the output LC filter of a three‐phase inverter is derived in the z‐domain. The devised formulation allows the comparison of two techniques based on a lead compensator and Smith predictor structure. These solutions permit the bandwidth of the current regulator to be widened while still achieving good dynamic performance. As a consequence, the voltage regulator can be designed for a wide bandwidth and even mitigates odd harmonics arising with unbalance loads supply. Discrete‐time domain implementation issues of an anti‐wind up scheme are discussed as well, highlighting the limitations of some discretization methods. Experimental tests performed in accordance to Uninterruptible Power Supply standards verify the theoretical analysis

Design and Evaluation of High Power, High Efficiency and High Power Density Motor Drives for More Electric Aircrafts

More-electric aircraft (MEA) is an attractive concept as it can reduce carbon dioxide emission, relieve fossil-fuel consumption, improve the overall efficiency of aircraft, and reduce the operational costs. However, it poses substantial challenges in designing a high-performance motor drive system for such applications. In the report of Aircraft Technology Roadmap to 2050, the propulsion converter is required to be ultra-high efficiency, high power density, and high reliability. Though the wide band-gap devices, such as the Silicon-carbide based Metal Oxide Silicon Field Effect (SiC-MOSFET), shows better switching performance and improved high-temperature performance compared to the silicon counterparts, applying it to the MEA-related application is still challenging. The high switching speed of SiC-MOSFET reduces switching loss and enables the design of high-density converters. However, it poses intense challenges in limiting the stray inductance in the power stage. The fast switching behavior of SiC-MOSFET also challenges the design scalability by multi-chip parallel, which is essential in high-power-rating converters. Moreover, the partial discharge can happen at the lower voltage when the converter is operated at high altitude, low air-pressure conditions, which threatens the converter lifetime by the accelerated aging of the insulation system. This dissertation addresses these issues at the paper-design level, power-module level, and converter level, respectively. At the paper-design level, the proposed model-based design and optimization enables shoulder-by-shoulder performance comparison between different candidate topology and then generates optimal semiconductor design space for the selected topology. At the power-module level, this dissertation focuses on the development of an ultra-low inductance module by using a novel packaging structure that integrates the printed circuit board (PCB) with direct-bounding copper (DBC). The detailed power-loop optimization, thermal analysis, and fabrication guidance are discussed to demonstrate its performance and manufacturability. At the converter level, this dissertation provides a comprehensive design strategy to improve the performance of the laminated busbar. In the design of the busbar conduction layer, this work analyzed the impacts of each stray inductance item and then proposed a novel double-side decoupled conduction-layer structure with minimized stray inductance and improved dynamic current sharing. In the design of the insulation system of the busbar, this dissertation investigates the design strategy to ensure the busbar is free of partial discharge without sacrificing the parasitic control. Through the dissertation, a single-phase 150 kVA converter, a three-phase 450 kVA converter, and a 1.2 kV, 300 A power module are designed, fabricated, and tested to demonstrate the proposed design strategies

Numerical methods for queues with shared service

A queueing system is a mathematical abstraction of a situation where elements, called customers, arrive in a system and wait until they receive some kind of service. Queueing systems are omnipresent in real life. Prime examples include people waiting at a counter to be served, airplanes waiting to take off, traffic jams during rush hour etc. Queueing theory is the mathematical study of queueing phenomena. As often neither the arrival instants of the customers nor their service times are known in advance, queueing theory most often assumes that these processes are random variables. The queueing process itself is then a stochastic process and most often also a Markov process, provided a proper description of the state of the queueing process is introduced. This dissertation investigates numerical methods for a particular type of Markovian queueing systems, namely queueing systems with shared service. These queueing systems differ from traditional queueing systems in that there is simultaneous service of the head-of-line customers of all queues and in that there is no service if there are no customers in one of the queues. The absence of service whenever one of the queues is empty yields particular dynamics which are not found in traditional queueing systems. These queueing systems with shared service are not only beautiful mathematical objects in their own right, but are also motivated by an extensive range of applications. The original motivation for studying queueing systems with shared service came from a particular process in inventory management called kitting. A kitting process collects the necessary parts for an end product in a box prior to sending it to the assembly area. The parts and their inventories being the customers and queues, we get ``shared service'' as kitting cannot proceed if some parts are absent. Still in the area of inventory management, the decoupling inventory of a hybrid make-to-stock/make-to-order system exhibits shared service. The production process prior to the decoupling inventory is make-to-stock and driven by demand forecasts. In contrast, the production process after the decoupling inventory is make-to-order and driven by actual demand as items from the decoupling inventory are customised according to customer specifications. At the decoupling point, the decoupling inventory is complemented with a queue of outstanding orders. As customisation only starts when the decoupling inventory is nonempty and there is at least one order, there is again shared service. Moving to applications in telecommunications, shared service applies to energy harvesting sensor nodes. Such a sensor node scavenges energy from its environment to meet its energy expenditure or to prolong its lifetime. A rechargeable battery operates very much like a queue, customers being discretised as chunks of energy. As a sensor node requires both sensed data and energy for transmission, shared service can again be identified. In the Markovian framework, "solving" a queueing system corresponds to finding the steady-state solution of the Markov process that describes the queueing system at hand. Indeed, most performance measures of interest of the queueing system can be expressed in terms of the steady-state solution of the underlying Markov process. For a finite ergodic Markov process, the steady-state solution is the unique solution of $N-1$ balance equations complemented with the normalisation condition, $N$ being the size of the state space. For the queueing systems with shared service, the size of the state space of the Markov processes grows exponentially with the number of queues involved. Hence, even if only a moderate number of queues are considered, the size of the state space is huge. This is the state-space explosion problem. As direct solution methods for such Markov processes are computationally infeasible, this dissertation aims at exploiting structural properties of the Markov processes, as to speed up computation of the steady-state solution. The first property that can be exploited is sparsity of the generator matrix of the Markov process. Indeed, the number of events that can occur in any state --- or equivalently, the number of transitions to other states --- is far smaller than the size of the state space. This means that the generator matrix of the Markov process is mainly filled with zeroes. Iterative methods for sparse linear systems --- in particular the Krylov subspace solver GMRES --- were found to be computationally efficient for studying kitting processes only if the number of queues is limited. For more queues (or a larger state space), the methods cannot calculate the steady-state performance measures sufficiently fast. The applications related to the decoupling inventory and the energy harvesting sensor node involve only two queues. In this case, the generator matrix exhibits a homogene block-tridiagonal structure. Such Markov processes can be solved efficiently by means of matrix-geometric methods, both in the case that the process has finite size and --- even more efficiently --- in the case that it has an infinite size and a finite block size. Neither of the former exact solution methods allows for investigating systems with many queues. Therefore we developed an approximate numerical solution method, based on Maclaurin series expansions. Rather than focussing on structural properties of the Markov process for any parameter setting, the series expansion technique exploits structural properties of the Markov process when some parameter is sent to zero. For the queues with shared exponential service and the service rate sent to zero, the resulting process has a single absorbing state and the states can be ordered such that the generator matrix is upper-diagonal. In this case, the solution at zero is trivial and the calculation of the higher order terms in the series expansion around zero has a computational complexity proportional to the size of the state space. This is a case of regular perturbation of the parameter and contrasts to singular perturbation which is applied when the service times of the kitting process are phase-type distributed. For singular perturbation, the Markov process has no unique steady-state solution when the parameter is sent to zero. However, similar techniques still apply, albeit at a higher computational cost. Finally we note that the numerical series expansion technique is not limited to evaluating queues with shared service. Resembling shared queueing systems in that a Markov process with multidimensional state space is considered, it is shown that the regular series expansion technique can be applied on an epidemic model for opinion propagation in a social network. Interestingly, we find that the series expansion technique complements the usual fluid approach of the epidemic literature

Power Converters in Power Electronics

In recent years, power converters have played an important role in power electronics technology for different applications, such as renewable energy systems, electric vehicles, pulsed power generation, and biomedical sciences. Power converters, in the realm of power electronics, are becoming essential for generating electrical power energy in various ways. This Special Issue focuses on the development of novel power converter topologies in power electronics. The topics of interest include, but are not limited to: Z-source converters; multilevel power converter topologies; switched-capacitor-based power converters; power converters for battery management systems; power converters in wireless power transfer techniques; the reliability of power conversion systems; and modulation techniques for advanced power converters