Power Systems

A Voltage Source Converter (VSC) is a power electronic device that is widely used in many industrial applications such as electric vehicles, induction motors, wind turbine generators, power transmission and delivery. A basic 6-pulse VSC consists of 6 Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistors (IGBTs) which are controlled by a PWM waveform input. The system measurements are normally the three phase currents and the DC voltage. If sine PWM is used, the inputs to the system are the PWM modulation index and the phase angle. Although the actual system model is switched, an approximate average model are typically used. A Proportinonal-Integral vector control is commonly used in industry. The goal of this project is improve performance of power factor compensation and harmonic filtering using nonlinear adaptive control methods.

Ed Song was co-supervised with Prof. Venkata Dinavahi (ECE, UA), and his experimental work was performed at the RTX-Lab.

Together with Prof. Yunwei Li (ECE, UA) ANCL has developed it's own VSC teststand based on a Semikron Semiteach converter interfaced to a modular dSpace controller. This experimental test stand is shown below (dSPACE and host development PC not shown).

Labelled picture of circuitry

Students

  • Edward Song (M.Sc.), Ning Xu (M.Sc.), Rasoul Milasi (Ph.D.)

Related Publications

  • R.M. Milasi, A.F. Lynch, and Y. Li. Adaptive vector control for voltage source converters, IET Control Theory and Applications, Volume 7, Number 8, 2013, 1110-1119. http://dx.doi.org/10.1049/iet-cta.2011.0785
  • R.M. Milasi, A.F. Lynch, and Y. Li. Adaptive control of a voltage source converter for power factor correction, IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics, Volume 28, Number 10, 2013, 4767-4779. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TPEL.2012.2236685
  • E. Song, A.F. Lynch, and V. Dinavahi. Experimental validation of a flatness-based control for a voltage source converter, IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, Volume 17, Number 5, 2009, 1135-1144. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TCST.2008.2001741
  • R.M. Milasi, A.F. Lynch, and Y. Li. Experimental validation of an adaptive control for a Voltage Source Converter. Proceedings of the American Control Conference (ACC), sponsored by AACC/IFAC, (Washington, DC), 6/13, 4159-4164.
  • R. Milasi, A.F. Lynch, and Y. Li. Adaptive control of a voltage source converter. Proceedings of the Canadian Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering (CCECE) , sponsored by IEEE, (Calgary, AB), 5/10, 4 pages.
  • E. Song, A.F. Lynch, and V. Dinavahi. Experimental validation of a flatness-based control for a voltage source converter. Proceedings of the American Control Conference (ACC), sponsored by AACC/IFAC, (New York, NY), 6/07, 6049-6054.