Vector Control of AC Drives

Vector Control of AC Drives

The Department of Electric, Electronics, Computers and Systems Engineering started working in the field of vector control of AC machines some ten years ago. At the moment, the group consists of two Associate Professors and three Assistant Professors. In addition, several Master Projects and Ph.D. Thesis are currently being conducted.

The activity carried out by our group has been focused on (not restricted to though) the following topics:

Field oriented control.
Three-phase pulse width modulation and current regulation.
Motion control.
Multi-motor drives.
Sensorless control.
Condition monitoring, fault detection and isolation.

We have been involved in several projects through the last years. These projects include industrial applications fully supported by industry as well as research and development projects, often supported by both industry and public institutions, including local and national agencies and the European Union. A partial view of our lab is seen in Figure 1.

Figure 1: View of the AC drives laboratory at the Electric Engineering Department.

As required for each project, different hardware and software has been used. This includes commercial drives from different manufacturers as Siemens, Telemechanique, Control Techniques, etc. For specific applications more flexible hardware and software are often used, as Skiip packs by Semikron for the power stages, control boards by dSpace for control, etc. Next two of our fields of research are briefly described.

Main Research Groups