MOTOR DRIVES BY K .

SUNIL KUMAR GRIET-POWER ELECTRONICS

1 Introduction The widespread proliferation of power electronics and ancillary control circuits into motor control systems in the past two or three decades have led to a situation where motor drives, which process about two-thirds of the worlds electrical power into mechanical power, are on the threshold of processing all of this power via power electronics. The days of driving motors directly from the fixed ac or dc mains via mechanical adjustments are almost over. The marriage of power electronics with motors has meant that processes can now be driven much more efficiently with a much greater degree of flexibility than previously possible. Of course, certain processes are more favorable to certain types of motors, because of the more favorable match between their characteristics. Historically, this situation was brought about by the demands of the industry. Increasingly, however, power electronic devices and control hardware are becoming able to easily tailor the rigid characteristics of the motor (when driven from a fixed dc or ac supply source) to the requirements of the load. Development of novel forms of machines and control techniques therefore has not abated, as recent trends would indicate. It should be expected that just as power electronics equipment has tremendous variety, depending on the power level of the application, motors also come in many different types, depending on the requirements of application and power level. Often the choice of a motor and its power electronic drive circuit for application are forced by these realities, and the application engineer therefore needs to have a good understanding of the application, the available motor types, and the suitable power electronic converter and its control techniques. Table 33.1 gives a rough guide of combinations of suitable motors and power electronic converters for a few typical applications.

DC Motor Drives Direct-current motors are extensively used in ariable-speed drives and position-control systems where good dynamic response and steady-state performance are required. Examples are in robotic drives, printers, machine tools, process rolling mills, paper and textile industries, and many others. Control of a dc motor, especially of the separately excited type, is very straightforward, mainly because of the incorporation of the commutator within the motor. The commutator-brush allows the motor-developed torque to be proportional to the armature current if the field current is held constant. Classical control theories are then easily applied to the design of the torque and other motion loops of a drive system. For the separately excited dc motor, assuming that the field excitation is held constant, the transfer characteristic between the shaft speed and the applied voltage to the armature can be expressed as indicated in the block diagram of Fig. 33.4. If we ignore the load torque TL, the transfer characteristic is

Thyristor Converter Drive Consider the dc drive of Fig. 33.5 for which the armature supply voltage va to the motor is given by va = 2Vmax cos (33.11) where Vmax is the peak value of the line-line ac supply voltage to the converter and is the firing angle. The dc output voltage va is controllable via the firing angle , which in turn is controlled by the control voltage ec as the input to the firing control circuit (FCC). The FCC is synchronized with the mains ac supply and drives individual thyristors in the acdc converter according to the desired firing angle. Depending on the load and the speed of operation, the conduction of the current may become discontinuous as indicated in Fig. 33.6a. When this happens, the converter output voltage does not change with the control voltage as proportionately as with the continuous conduction. The motor speed now drops much more with the load as indicated by Fig. 33.6b. The consequent loss of gain of the converter may have to be avoided or compensated if good control over speed is desired.

Variable CurrentVariable Frequency (If ) Control In this scheme, medium- to large-capacity induction motors are driven from a variable but stiff current supply that may be obtained from a thyristor converter and a dc-link inductor as indicated in Fig. 33.23. The frequency of the current supply to the motor is adjusted by a thyristor converter with

poles are indicated in Fig. 33.81. The motor can be stepped clock or anticlockwise by energizing the phase winding in the ABCA or ACBA sequence, respectively. The step angle, i.e. the angle moved by the rotor for each change in excitation sequence, of the motor is given by s = 360

auxiliary diodes and capacitors. The diodes in each inverter leg and the capacitors across them are needed for turning off the thyristors when current is to be commutated from one to the next in sequence. The motor current waveforms are normally six-step, or quasi-square, as indicated in Fig. 33.24. The switching states of the inverter thyristors are also indicated in this figure. The motor voltage waveforms are determined by the load. These waveforms are more nearly sinusoidal than the current waveforms. The thyristor converter supplying the quasi-square current waveforms to the motor has firing-angle control, in order to regulate the dc-link current to the inverter. The dynamics of the dc-link current control is such that this current may be considered to be constant during the time, the inverter switches commutate the dc-link current from one switch to the next. Such a current-source drive offers four-quadrant operation, with independent control of the dc-link current and output frequency. One drawback is that the motor voltage waveforms have voltage spikes due to commutation. From the analysis of Section 33.3.2, if the higher order harmonics of the current waveforms in Fig. 33.24 are neglected, and it is assumed that the motor voltage and current waveforms are taken to be sinusoidal, the magnetizing current Im in Fig. 33.13 can be kept constant (for constant-airgap flux Single-stack Variable-reluctance Stepper Motor Single-stack motors are normally of the variablereluctance type with no excitation in the rotor. The cross section of a three-phase motor with two stator poles/phase and four rotor

FIGURE 33.81 Cross section of a single-stack variablereluctance stepper motor. where N is the number of

phases in the stator and P is the number of poles in the stator. Single stack motors typically has larger step angles than other types because of limitations of space for the windings. The step angle of these motor tend to be larger than the multistack and hybrid stepper motors. For each excited winding, the motor develops a torque angle (T) characteristic as indicated in Fig. 33.82. Note that there are two equilibrium positions of the rotor, namely, X and Y , where the motor develops zero torque. The position X is referred to as the stable detent position, around which the rotor develops a restoring torque when displaced. The restoring torque increases as the rotor is moved from its detent position, becoming a maximum Tmax on either side of this position. The slope of the T characteristic around this detent position and the maximum torque, both of which depend on the level of excitation, indicate how far the rotor will be displaced under load torque. This means that the level of excitation also affects the position holding accuracy of the motor. The motor may also be excited in the sequence: AB BCCA or ABCABC for forward and reverse stepping, respectively. The two phases-on scheme develops more torque around the detent positions at the expense of twice the resistive losses.

Yet another excitation scheme is ABBBCCCA AAB for forward stepping and ABAACCBC BAB for reverse stepping. In this scheme, the step size is halved as opposed to the full-step size of the previous sequences. Two different levels of torque is produced for alternate detent positions. However, the reduced step size and the more damped nature of each step may outweigh this disadvantage.

References
1. J. Kostko, Polyphase reaction synchronous motors, J. Amer. Inst. Elec. Eng., 42, 11621168, 1923. 2. D. OKelly and S. Simmons, Introduction to Generalised Electrical Machine Theory, McGraw Hill, U.K., 1968. 3. D. Staton, W. Soong, and T.J. Miller, Unified theory of torque production in switched reluctance motors, IEEE Trans. on Industry Applications, IA-31, 329337, 1995.