High performance disturbance observer based control system design for permanent magnet synchronous AC machine applications

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonAn electrical machine is one of the main workforces in different industries and serves them in various applications. Machine drive control design involves many technical issues for efficient and robust exploitation. Over several decades, Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor (PMSM) is getting preferred for industrial applications over its counterpart Squirrel Cage Induction Motor (SCIM) drive, because of their higher efficiency, power density, and higher torque to inertia ratio. In the prospective that PMSM drives are considered the drives of the future, there are still technical challenges and issues related to PMSM control. Many studies have been devoted to PMSM control in the past, but there are still some open research areas that bring worldwide researchers’ interests back to PMSM drive control. One of the approaches that may facilitate better performance, higher efficiency, and robust and reliable work of the control system is the disturbance observer-based control (DOBC) with linear and nonlinear output feedback control for PM synchronous machine applications. DOBC is adopted due to its ability to reject external and internal disturbances with improving tracking performance in the variable speed wind energy conversion system (WECS) to maximize power extraction. The high order disturbance observer (HODO) is utilized to estimate the aerodynamic torque-based wind speed without the use of a traditional anemometer, which reduces the overall cost and improves the reliability of the whole system. Also, this method has been designed to improve the angular shaft speed tracking of the PMSM system under load torque disturbance and speed variations. The model-based linear and nonlinear feedback control are used in the proposed control systems. The sliding mode control (SMC) with switching output feedback control law and integral SMC with linear feedback and state-dependent Riccati equation (SDRE) based approaches have been designed for the systems. The SDRE control accounts for the nonlinear multivariable structure of the WECS and is approximated with Taylor series expansion terms. The chattering inherited from SMC is eliminated by the continuous approximation technique. The sliding mode is guaranteed by eliminating the reaching mode in the proposed integral SMC. The model-free cascaded linear feedback control system based on the proportional-integral (PI) controllers use a back-calculation algorithm anti-windup scheme. The proposed speed controllers are synthesized with HODO to compensate for the external disturbance, model uncertainty, noise, and modelling errors. Moreover, servomechanism-based SDRE control, a near-optimal control system is designed to suppress the model uncertainty and noise without the use of disturbance observers. The proposed control systems for PMSM speed regulation have demonstrated a significant improvement in the angular shaft speed-tracking performance at the transients. Their performances have been tested under speed, load torque variations, and model uncertainty. For example, HODO-based SMC with switching output feedback control law (SOFCL) has demonstrated improvement by more than 78% than the PI-PI control system of the PMSM. The performance of the HODOs-based Integral SMC with SDRE nonlinear feedback is improved by 80.5% under external disturbance, model uncertainty, and noise than Integral SMC with linear feedback in the WECS. The HODO-based SDRE control with servomechanism has shown an 80.2% improvement of mean absolute percentage error under disturbances than Integral SMC with linear feedback in the WECS. The PMSM speed tracking performance of the proposed HODO-based discrete-time PI-PI control system with back-calculation algorithm anti-windup scheme is improved by 87.29% and 90.2% in the speed commands and load torque disturbance variations scenarios respectively. The simulations for testing the proposed control system of the PMSM system and WECS have been implemented in Matlab/Simulink environment. The PMSM speed control experimental results have been obtained with Lucas-Nuelle DSP-based rapid control prototyping kit.Center for International Program “Bolashak” of the Ministry of Education and Science Republic of Kazakhsta

HIGH ORDER DISTURBANCE OBSERVER BASED PI-PI CONTROL SYSTEM WITH TRACKING ANTI-WINDUP TECHNIQUE FOR IMPROVEMENT OF TRANSIENT PERFORMANCE OF PMSM

This paper focuses on designing a disturbance observer-based control (DOBC) system for PMSM drives. The cascade structure of the discrete-time PI-PI control system with tracking anti-windup scheme has been designed for both loops. In this study, high order disturbance observer (HODO) based control is used to improve the speed tracking performance of the control system for the PMSM prototyping kit regardless of the disturbance and unmodelled dynamics. The motion equation was modified in the HODO in which torque losses due to the drug resulting from the time-varying flux, hysteresis, and friction have been taken into account to estimate the total disturbance. The HODO does not require the derivatives of the disturbance to be zero, like in the traditional ones. It demonstrates its ability to estimate along with a load torque the high order disturbances caused by a cogging torque and a high-frequency electromagnetic noise in the PMSM system. In the real-time experiments, the proposed algorithm with HODO achieves less speed errors and faster response comparing with the baseline controller. The performances with proposed and baseline control have been evaluated under mechanical speed and load torque variation cases. The experimental results have proved the feasibility of the proposed control scheme. The proposed disturbance observer-based control system was implemented with a Lucas-Nuelle 300 W PMSM prototyping kit

SDRE-Based Integral Sliding Mode Control for Wind Energy Conversion Systems

This paper proposes a novel integral sliding mode control (ISMC) scheme based on numerically solving a state-dependent Ricatti equation (SDRE), nonlinear feedback control for wind energy conversion systems (WECSs) with permanent magnet synchronous generators (PMSGs). Unlike the conventional ISMC, the proposed control system is designed with nonlinear near optimal feedback control part to take into account nonlinearities of the WECSs. The Taylor series are used to approximate the solutions of SDRE. More specifically, the nonlinear optimal feedback control has been obtained by solving continuous algebraic Ricatti and Lyapunov equations. Sliding variables are designed such that reaching phase is eliminated and stability is guaranteed. The proposed control method equipped with high-order observer can guarantee more superior results than linear techniques such as linear quadratic regulator (LQR), conventional ISMC, and first-order sliding-mode control (SMC) method. Increasing the number of terms of the Taylor’s series of the proposed control law provides better approximation, therefore the performance is improved. However, this increases the computational burden. The effectiveness of the control method is validated via simulations in MATLAB/Simulink under nominal parameters and model uncertainties

Output Regulation-Based Optimal Control System for Maximum Power Extraction of a Machine-Side Power Converter in Variable-Speed WECS

In this study, the integral linear quadratic regulator (LQR) with servomechanism for machine-side power converter in PMSG-based variable-speed wind energy conversion systems (WECSs) has been proposed. The solution of the algebraic Riccati equation (ARE) has been found for the extended dimension of the state space equation of the system. The state vector has been extended with the integral of the angular shaft speed of the permanent magnet synchronous generator (PMSG) to penalize the errors. The maximum power tracking point (MPPT) algorithm is achieved by minimizing tracking errors between the angular shaft speed reference based on wind speed estimation and its actual values in the variable speed WECS. Also, the estimated aerodynamic torque is used to define the reference electromagnetic torque. This is possible when WECS is partially loaded and pitches angles are fixed at the position to generate maximum power. The mean absolute percentage error of the angular shaft speed of the PMSG-based WECS has been reduced by more than 71% under model uncertainty and noise presented case than in the traditional disturbance observers-based compensation scheme. While the disturbance observers for estimation model uncertainty are eliminated, the use of the high order disturbance observer for aerodynamic torque estimation proved to be necessary to enhance the reliability of wind speed sensors and hence the whole WECS