AC Ward Leonard Drive Systems Revisiting the Four-Quadrant
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European Journal of Control ∎ (∎∎∎∎) ∎∎∎–∎∎∎ Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect European Journal of Control journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ejcon AC Ward Leonard drive systems: Revisiting the four-quadrant operation of AC machines$ Qing-Chang Zhong n Dept. of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield S1 3JD, UK article info abstract Article history: In this paper, the problem of controlling the speed of AC machines in four quadrants is revisited from a Received 13 May 2013 completely new viewpoint, based on the idea of powering an AC machine with a synchronous generator Accepted 13 May 2013 that generates a variable-voltage–variable-frequency supply. This is a natural, mathematical, but not fi Recommended by Alessandro Astol physical, extension of the conventional Ward Leonard drive systems for DC machines to AC machines. As a result, AC drives can be regarded as generator-motor systems, which facilitate the analysis of AC Keywords: drives and the introduction of other special functions because a system consisting of a generator and a Variable speed drives motor is easier to be handled than the conventional AC drive that consists of an inverter and a motor. Ward Leonard drive systems Control strategies, with and without a speed sensor, are proposed to implement this idea and the AC machines experimental results are presented to demonstrate the feasibility. Synchronverters & 2013 European Control Association. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Inverters that mimic synchronous generators Speed-sensorless 1. Introduction flux. It is widely used in open-loop drives, where the require- ment of performance, e.g. speed accuracy and response, is not Motors consume the majority of electricity, of which 50–70% is high and/or the controller needs to be simple [25]. This is also consumed by asynchronous electric motors and 3–10% by synchro- called scalar control because only the amplitude of the voltage nous electric motors.1 Variable speed drives (VSD), often equipped is controlled. It is possible to add feedback, e.g. speed, torque with inverters, are hence widely used nowadays to save energy, and/or flux, to improve the performance [2,24]. increase productivity and improve quality in many applications, such (2) Vector control: The idea is to control AC motors in a way similar as home appliances, robots, pumps, fans, automotive, railway, to controlling separately excited DC motors, after introducing industrial processes and, recently, renewable energy. AC motors are some transformations. The three phase currents are converted themaindrivingforceinindustrybecauseoftheirsmallsize, into d, q current components id and iq, which correspond to the reliability, low cost and low maintenance [4,5,12,18]. Due to the field and armature currents of DC motors, respectively. If id is advancement of power electronics, digital signal processing (DSP), oriented (aligned) in the direction of the rotor flux and iq is etc., the technology of VSD for AC motors is matured and AC drives perpendicular to it, then the control of id and iq is decoupled, as have replaced DC drives in many application areas. There are mainly inthecaseofDCmotors.Thefrequencyisnotdirectlycontrolled three approaches developed for AC drives [4,6,12]: as in the scalar control but indirectly controlled; the torque is controlled indirectly via controlling the current. The advantage of (1) V/f control: The idea is to generate a variable-voltage–variable- vector control is that it provides good performance that is similar frequency sinusoidal power supply from a constant DC power to DC drives. The drawbacks of vector control are: (i) the flux source. The control variables are voltage and frequency while estimation and field orientation are dependent on motor para- maintaining their ratio constant to provide (almost) constant meters, which change in reality (e.g. with temperature); (ii) the controller is very complicated and (iii) the inverter is often current controlled via hysteresis-band PWM, which makes the fi ☆Some preliminary results of this work were presented at the 5th IET Interna- system analysis dif cult [3,9,11,16,22]. A lot of patches have been tional Conference on Power Electronics, Machines and Drives (PEMD) held in April developed for vector control to improve the performance 2010 in Brighton, UK and at the 20th International Symposium on Power [1,7,10,14,15,17,19,20,27]. Electronics, Electrical Drives, Automation and Motion (SPEEDAM) held in June (3) Direct torque (and flux) control: The torque (and stator flux) are 2010 in Pisa, Italy. n directly controlled via selecting appropriate inverter voltage Tel.: +44 114 22 25630; fax: +44 114 22 25683. E-mail addresses: Q.Zhong@Sheffield.ac.uk, [email protected] space vectors through a look-up table but the frequency is 1 http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Power+System+Load. indirectly controlled [8,26,30,28]. It uses hysteresis-based control, 0947-3580/$ - see front matter & 2013 European Control Association. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ejcon.2013.05.013 Please cite this article as: Q.-C. Zhong, , AC Ward Leonard drive systems: Revisiting the four-quadrant operation of AC machines, European Journal of Control (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ejcon.2013.05.013i 2 Q.-C. Zhong / European Journal of Control ∎ (∎∎∎∎) ∎∎∎–∎∎∎ which generates flux and torque ripples, and the switching frequency is not constant. It also needs motor parameters to fl estimate the torque (and stator ux) [13,23,29]. Again, the Load hysteresis-based control makes system analysis very difficult. Prime mover These three schemes have been further advanced for a long period Constant Variable with the development of related technologies in e.g. control theory speed speed and microelectronics. They are suitable for different applications because of their different characteristics [4,12,21]. The vector control and direct torque (and flux) control provide very good performance but the control algorithms involve several transfor- Controllable field Fixed field mations and are very complicated. What is worse is that look-up tables are used in the direct torque (and flux) control, which Fig. 1. Conventional (DC) Ward Leonard drive systems. makes the analytical analysis of the system very difficult. The high order of the resulting complete system from these approaches also 2. Ward Leonard drive systems means that the system stability is difficult to guarantee. V/f control is simple but the performance needs to be improved. Hence, a Induction motors, particularly those of the squirrel-cage type, simple high-performance AC drive that facilitates the analytical have been the principal workhorse for long time. However, until the analysis of the system is desirable. beginning of 1970s, they had been operated in the constant-voltage– From the viewpoint of control system design, the AC motor is constant-frequency (CVCF) uncontrolled mode, which is still very simply the load to an inverter. The main control objective of a common nowadays. VSDs were dominated by DC motors in the drive is to regulate the speed and the torque to obtain fast and Ward Leonard arrangement. Ward Leonard drive systems, also good response and the change of the motor parameters (including known as Ward Leonard Control, were widely used DC motor speed the load) should not impose a major problem to the system. Such control systems introduced by Harry Ward Leonard in 1891. A Ward an attempt is made in this paper, following the concept of Leonard drive system, as shown in Fig. 1, consists of a motor (prime operating inverters to mimic synchronous generators [33–35] mover) and a generator with shafts coupled together. The motor, and motivated by the conventional Ward Leonard drive systems which turns at a constant speed, may be AC or DC powered. The (WLDS). The physical interpretation of this is that the AC motor is generator is a DC generator, with field windings and armature powered by a synchronous generator (SG) driven by a variable- windings. The field windings are supplied with a variable DC source speed prime mover. The synchronous generator and the prime to produce a variable output voltage in the armature windings, which mover are then replaced by an inverter that behaves as a isusuallyusedtopowerasecondDCmotorthatdrivestheload. synchronous generator. The torque and speed of the AC motor A natural analogy is to replace the DC generator with a synchro- are then controlled via controlling the torque and frequency of the nous generator and the DC motor with an AC machine (an induction synchronous generator. The resulting control scheme is very motororasynchronousmotor);seeFig. 2(a). This configuration is simple as it does not involve vector transformations nor the called AC Ward Leonard drive systems [31,32]. It is worth noting that estimation of flux. No complicated concepts, e.g. vector control the physical implementation of anACWardLeonarddrivesystemis and field orientation, are needed and the scheme is very easy to of limited use, as described below. The prime mover in a DC WLDS understand. This also unifies the drive for synchronous motors maintains a constant speed and the flux of the generator is variable; (SM) and induction motors (IM). In the proposed scheme, the the prime mover in an AC WLDS needs to have a variable speed (so attention of how to design AC drives has shifted from motor- that the frequency of the output can be varied) and the flux of the oriented to inverter-oriented. This has led to an extremely simple generator is constant. The output of the generator (voltage) in a DC controller. It can also be treated as the proposed AC drive is WLDS is varied via controlling the field voltage and the output of the powered by a synchronous generator while the vector-controlled generator (voltage and frequency) in an AC WLDS is varied via AC drives are powered by a DC generator with some transforma- controlling the speed of the prime mover.