Maximising Utilisation of the DC-Link Voltage in the Field Weakening Region for AC Motor Drives

Abstract

Most standard electric drives have two operational regions: the constant torque region and field weakening region. In order to increase the power level at the field-weakening region, the phase voltage must be increased. The phase voltage, however, is a function of the inverter input voltage and the control scheme that is applied to the inverter. Several methods have been applied to optimise the stator voltage modulation to maximise the power level at the field-weakening region. These methods suffer from fake voltage extension, which produce high current ripples, and a step reduction of motor currents in the transient area from the constant torque region to the field-weakening region. Adding extra regulators for these methods was proposed, but this still would not show any significant improvement in electric drive performance and increase the additional complexity of the closed-loop control system. During the course of this research, several control schemes based on mathematical modelling and voltage feedback mechanism are proposed to tackle the aforementioned issues. In the proposed novel methods, flux-producing current is designed based on the position of the stator voltage vector to push the stator voltage to the hexagonal voltage boundary. This consequently causes a smooth transition from the constant torque region to the field-weakening region, and it also increases the output torque and power of the electric machine without applying extra controllers or producing a step reduction on the d-axis current. The capabilities of the proposed schemes have been evaluated and compared to conventional model-based and closed-loop voltage algorithms by using MATLAB simulation and an experimental test set-up. This research also developed and proposed two parameter estimation techniques based on EKF and combined MRAS-KF to improve the accuracy of online estimation techniques. The performance of developed estimation schemes was investigated by using MATLAB simulation and a plant emulator-based setup.