Assessment of a Universal Reconfiguration-less Control Approach in Open-Phase Fault Operation for Multiphase Drives

Multiphase drives have been important in particular industry applications where reliability is a desired goal. The main reason for this is their inherent fault tolerance. Di erent nonlinear controllers that do not include modulation stages, like direct torque control (DTC) or model-based predictive control (MPC), have been used in recent times to govern these complex systems, including mandatory control reconfiguration to guarantee the fault tolerance characteristic. A new reconfiguration-less approach based on virtual voltage vectors (VVs) was recently proposed for MPC, providing a natural healthy and faulty closed-loop regulation of a particular asymmetrical six-phase drive. This work validates the interest in the reconfiguration-less approach for direct controllers and multiphase drives

Real Time Testing and Validation of a Novel Short Circuit Current (SCC) Controller for a Photovoltaic Inverter

About 45% applications from PV solar farm developers seeking connections to the distribution grids in Ontario were denied in 2011-13 as the short circuit current (SCC) capacity of several distribution substations had already been reached. PV solar system inverters typically contribute 1.2 p.u. to 1.8 p.u. fault current which was not considered acceptable by utility companies due to the need for very expensive protective breaker upgrades. Since then, this cause has become a major impediment in the growth of PV based renewable systems in Ontario. A novel predictive technique has been patented in our research group for management of short circuit current contribution from PV inverters to ensure effective deployment of solar farms. This thesis deals with the real time testing and validation of a short circuit current (SCC) controller based on the above technique. With this SCC controller, the PV inverter can be shut off within 1-2 milliseconds from the initiation of any fault in the grid that can cause the short circuit current to exceed the rated current of the inverter. Therefore, the power system does not see any short circuit current contribution from the PV inverter and no expensive upgrades in protective breakers are required in the system. The performance of the PV solar system with the short circuit current controller is simulated and tested using (i) industry grade electromagnetic transients software PSCAD/EMTDC (ii) real time simulation studies on the Real Time Digital Simulator (RTDS) (iii) physical implementation on dSPACE board to generate firing pulses for the inverter. The validation of controller is done on dSPACE board with actual PV inverter short circuit waveforms obtained from Southern California Edison Short Circuit Testing Lab. This novel technology is planned to be showcased on a physical 10 kW PV solar system in Bluewater Power Distribution Corporation, Sarnia, Ontario. This proposed technology is expected to remove the technical hurdles which caused the denials of connectivity to several PV solar farms, and effectively lead to greater connections of PV solar farms in Ontario and in similar jurisdictions, worldwide

Novel Pilot Directional Protection for the FREEDM Smart Grid System

abstract: The presence of distributed generation in high renewable energy penetration system increases the complexity for fault detection as the power flow is bidirectional. The conventional protection scheme is not sufficient for the bidirectional power flow system, hence a fast and accurate protection scheme needs to be developed. This thesis mainly deals with the design and validation of the protection system based on the Future Renewable Electric Energy Delivery and Management (FREEDM) system, which is a bidirectional power flow loop system. The Large-Scale System Simulation (LSSS) is a system level PSCAD model which is used to validate component models for different time-scale platforms to provide a virtual testing platform for the Future Renewable Electric Energy Delivery and Management (FREEDM) system. It is also used to validate the cases of power system protection, renewable energy integration and storage, and load profiles. The protection of the FREEDM system against any abnormal condition is one of the important tasks. Therefore, the pilot directional protection scheme based on wireless communication is used in this thesis. The use of wireless communication is extended to protect the large scale meshed distributed generation from any fault. The complete protection system consists of the main protection and the back-up protection which are both presented in the thesis. The validation of the protection system is performed on a radial system test bed using commercial relays at the ASU power laboratory, and on the RTDS platform (Real Time Digital Power System) in CAPS (Center for Advanced Power System) Florida. Considering that the commercial relays have limitations of high cost and communicating with fault isolation devices, a hardware prototype using the interface between the ADC (analog to digital converter) and MATLAB software is developed, which takes advantage of economic efficiency and communication compatibility. Part of this research work has been written into a conference paper which was presented by IEEE Green Tech Meeting, 2017.Dissertation/ThesisMasters Thesis Electrical Engineering 201

Active current sharing control schemes for parallel connected AC/DC/AC converters

PhD ThesisThe parallel operation of voltage fed converters can be used in many applications, such as aircraft, aerospace, and wind turbines, to increase the current handling capability, system efficiency, flexibility, and reliability through providing redundancy. Also, the maintenance of low power parallel connected units is lower than one high power unit. Significant performance improvement can be attained with parallel converters employing interleaving techniques where small passive components can be used due to harmonic cancellation. In spite of the advantages offered by parallel connected converters, the circulating current problem is still a major concern. The term circulating current describes the uneven current sharing between the units. This circulating current leads to: current distortion, unbalanced operation, which possibly damages the converters, and a reduction in overall system performance. Therefore, current sharing control methods become necessary to limit the circulating current in a parallel connected converter system. The work in this thesis proposes four active current sharing control schemes for two equally rated, directly paralleled, AC/DC/AC converters. The first scheme is referred to as a “time sharing approach,” and it divides the operation time between the converters. Accordingly, in the scheme inter-module reactors become unnecessary, as these are normally employed at the output of each converter. However, this approach can only be used with a limited number of parallel connected units. To avoid this limitation, three other current sharing control schemes are proposed. Moreover, these three schemes can be adopted with any pulse width modulation (PWM) strategy and can be easily extended to three or more parallel connected units since they employ a modular architecture. The proposed current sharing control methods are employed in two applications: a current controller for three-phase RL load and an open loop V/f speed control for a three-phase induction motor. The performance of the proposed methods is verified in both transient and steady state conditions using numerical simulation and experimental testingMinistry of Higher Education and Scientific Research of Iraq

Field Oriented Control of Multiphase Drives with Passive Fault-Tolerance

Multiphase machines provide continuous operation of the drive with no additional hardware in the event of one or more open-phase faults. This faulttolerant capability is highly appreciated by industry for security and economic reasons. However, the steadystate post-fault operation has only been feasible in previous works after the fault localization and control reconfiguration. Even though this is done at the software stage, the obligation to identify the faulty phases and store the modifications for every fault scenario adds further complexity. This work reveals that this software reconfiguration can be avoided if the field-oriented control (FOC) strategy is designed to satisfactorily handle pre- and post-fault situations. Experimental results confirm the capability to obtain suitable postfault operation without fault localization and control reconfiguration, thus achieving a passive/natural fault tolerance.Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades RTI2018-096151-B-I0

Laboratory implementations of PMSM drive in hybrid electric vehicles applications

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are one of the today\u27s most successful technologies for developing systems that require real time operation and providing additional flexibility to the designer. This research is focused on developing a control board for a permanent magnet synchronous machine (PMSM) using an FPGA module. The board is configured for individual use of an FPGA, digital signal processor (DSP) or in combination to control the PMSM by generating the required Pulse Width Modulator (PWM) to the inverter in order to drive and control the speed of the PMSM. Since, the exact rotor position and speed are required to control the motor; a useful method is developed digitally and implemented in the FPGA hardware module. The speed observer (SO), in which the Hall effect signals were used to calculate the speed and the angle of the rotor. In this thesis, three different techniques of PWM generation were developed and combined with rotor position and speed method. The project is implemented in Altera FPGA using Quartus II software V11.0 with VHDL as the supporting language. The design achieved high performance and accuracy of the detection estimation and control scheme for the Permanent Magnet Synchronous Machine. Error and design analysis has been done also --Abstract, page iii

Load Adaptive Modulation to Heat Non-Ferromagnetic Material

Department of Electrical EngineeringInduction heating (IH) cooktops are popular to heat various vessels fast and safely in the kitchen. Conventional IH cooktop system have been developed to heat the vessel of ferromagnetic materials. Because the vessel of non-ferromagnetic materials has low-resistance which induces large resonant current to power switches in series resonant IH inverters. Hence, the rated power cannot be transferred to the vessel due to overcurrent which is higher the rated switch current. In this thesis, a load adaptive modulation (LAM) method is proposed to heat the vessel of non-ferromagnetic and ferromagnetic materials in a single IH burner. The LAM can change the magnitude of the input voltage of the IH working coil and the operating frequency induced to the IH working coil according to the resistance of the vessel. The operational principle and the design method are analyzed to implement the proposed LAM and its power control. The validity of the design method and the control algorithm is experimentally verified using a 2 kW prototype series resonant full-bridge inverter with the IH working coil.ope

Synchronverter-based control for wind power

More and more attention has been paid to the energy crisis due to the increasing energy demand from industrial and commercial applications. The utilisation of wind power, which is considered as one of the most promising renewable energy sources, has grown rapidly in the last three decades. In recent years, many power converter techniques have been developed to integrate wind power with the electrical grid. The use of power electronic converters allows for variable speed operation of wind turbines, and enhanced power extraction. This work, which is supported by EPSRC and Nheolis under the DHPA scheme, focuses on the design and analysis of control systems for wind power. In this work, two of the most popular AC-DC-AC topologies with permanent magnet synchronous generators (PMSG) have been developed. One consists of an uncontrollable rectifier, a boost converter and an inverter and a current control scheme is proposed to achieve the maximum power point tracking (MPPT). In the control strategy, the output current of the uncontrollable rectifier is controlled by a boost converter according to the current reference, which is determined by a climbing algorithm, to achieve MPPT. The synchronverter technology has been applied to control the inverter for the grid-connection. An experimental setup based on DSP has been designed to implement all the above mentioned experiments. In addition, a synchronverter-based parallel control strategy, which consists of a frequency droop loop and a voltage droop loop to achieve accurate sharing of real power and reactive power respectively, has been further studied. Moreover, a control strategy based on the synchronverter has been presented to force the inverter to have capacitive output impedance, so that the quality of the output voltage is improved. Abstract The other topology consists of a full-scale back-to-back converter, of which the rectifier is controllable. Two control strategies have been proposed to operate a three-phase rectifier to mimic a synchronous motor, following the idea of synchronverters to operate inverters to mimic synchronous generators. In the proposed schemes, the real power extracted from the source and the output voltage are the control variables, respectively, hence they can be employed in different applications. Furthermore, improved control strategies are proposed to self-synchronise with the grid. This does not only improve the performance of the system but also considerably reduces the complexity of the overall controller. All experiments have been implemented on a test rig based on dSPACE to demonstrate the excellent performance of the proposed control strategies with unity power factor, sinusoidal currents and good dynamics. Finally, an original control strategy based on the synchronverter technology has been proposed for back-to-back converters in wind power applications to make the whole system behave as a generator-motor-generator system

Low-voltage ride-through capability improvement of type-3 wind turbine through active disturbance rejection feedback control-based dynamic voltage restorer

Disconnections due to voltage drops in the grid cannot be permitted if wind turbines (WTs) contribute significantly to electricity production, as this increases the risk of production loss and destabilizes the grid. To mitigate the negative effects of these occurrences, WTs must be able to ride through the low-voltage conditions and inject reactive current to provide dynamic voltage support. This paper investigates the low-voltage ride-Through (LVRT) capability enhancement of a Type-3 WT utilizing a dynamic voltage restorer (DVR). During the grid voltage drop, the DVR quickly injects a compensating voltage to keep the stator voltage constant. This paper proposes an active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) scheme to control the rotor-side, grid-side and DVR-side converters in a wind-DVR integrated network. The performance of the Type-3 WT with DVR topology is evaluated under various test conditions using MATLAB®/Simulink®. These simulation results are also compared with the experimental results for the LVRT capability performed on a WT emulator equipped with a crowbar and direct current (DC) chopper. The simulation results demonstrate a favourable transient and steady-state response of the Type-3 wind turbine quantities defined by the LVRT codes, as well as improved reactive power support under balanced fault conditions. Under the most severe voltage drop of 95%, the stator currents, rotor currents and DC bus voltage are 1.25 pu, 1.40 pu and 1.09 UDC, respectively, conforming to the values of the LVRT codes. DVR controlled by the ADRC technique significantly increases the LVRT capabilities of a Type-3 doubly-fed induction generator-based WT under symmetrical voltage dip events. Although setting up ADRC controllers might be challenging, the proposed method has been shown to be extremely effective in reducing all kinds of internal and external disturbances

A drive system for six-phase switched reluctance motors

PhD ThesisSwitched Reluctance Motor (SRM) drives have been developed for decades. They are advantageous because of their simple structure, low manufacturing cost, high system reliability and wide speed range. They are one of the types of traction drive system employed for electric vehicles and are also used in the aviation industry. In this thesis, a novel six-phase SRM is selected to be the research object. Two converters with fewer switches are proposed which are a circle converter and a circle converter with extra diodes. Conventional control methods are modified to suit the selected SRM and applied with the proposed converters. Simulation results are compared with the conventional Asymmetric Half Bridge (AHB) converter and show that the proposed converters can work effectively as the conventional converter. In order to further reduce the torque ripple of the six-phase SRM, a Direct Torque Control (DTC) method is developed and applied to the AHB converter and the proposed converters. Simulation results show that the DTC method can reduce torque ripple throughout the whole speed range compared with traditional control methods. The effects of winding connections on performance of the six-phase SRM are discussed to find the optimum winding connection type. The effects are first studied from a single-phase excitation. Subsequently five different winding connection types are proposed and analysed. Both torque performance and mutual inductance distribution are discussed through multi-phase excitation simulations and an optimum winding connection type is proposed. A 4.0kW SRM test rig is built and commissioned in Newcastle University. Experimental results validate the optimum decoupled winding connection type, demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed circle converters, and verify the highly effective torque ripple reduction performance of the DTC method throughout the whole speed range