E. Galvan

Power-Electronic Systems for the Grid Integration of Renewable Energy Sources: A Survey

The use of distributed energy resources is increasingly being pursued as a supplement and an alternative to large conventional central power stations. The specification of a power-electronic interface is subject to requirements related not only to the renewable energy source itself but also to its effects on the power-system operation, especially where the intermittent energy source constitutes a significant part of the total system capacity. In this paper, new trends in power electronics for the integration of wind and photovoltaic (PV) power generators are presented. A review of the appropriate storage-system technology used for the integration of intermittent renewable energy sources is also introduced. Discussions about common and future trends in renewable energy systems based on reliability and maturity of each technology are presented

Energy Storage Systems for Transport and Grid Applications

Energy storage systems (ESSs) are enabling technologies for well-established and new applications such as power peak shaving, electric vehicles, integration of renewable energies, etc. This paper presents a review of ESSs for transport and grid applications, covering several aspects as the storage technology, the main applications, and the power converters used to operate some of the energy storage technologies. Special attention is given to the different applications, providing a deep description of the system and addressing the most suitable storage technology. The main objective of this paper is to introduce the subject and to give an updated reference to nonspecialist, academic, and engineers in the field of power electronics.

Analysis and design of direct power control (DPC) for a three phase synchronous rectifier via output regulation subspaces

In this paper, the authors present a controller that directly regulates the active and instantaneous reactive power in a synchronous three-phase boost-type rectifier. The controller ensures a good regulation of the output voltage, and guarantees the power factor close to one. The controller builds upon the ideas of the well known direct torque control (DTC) for induction motors. In their case, the active and reactive powers replace the torque and flux amplitude used as the controlled outputs in DTC, thus motivating the name DPC-control. They show that a simple modification to the original algorithm makes the selection of the control inputs more accurate. To formalize this technique, they utilize the concept of output regulation subspaces. A modification is added to the basic controller to deal with disturbances such as unbalance and distortion in the source voltage. Finally, the proposed controller was tested both in simulations and experimentally, and illustrative results are presented.

Speed control of induction motors using a novel fuzzy sliding-mode structure

This paper presents a new approach to indirect vector control of induction motors. Two nonlinear controllers, one of sliding mode type and the other PI-fuzzy logic-based, define a new control structure. Both controllers are combined by means of an expert system based on Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy reasoning. The sliding-mode controller acts mainly in a transient state while the PI-like fuzzy controller acts in the steady state. The new structure embodies the advantages that both nonlinear controllers offer: sliding-mode controllers increasing system stability limits, and PI-like fuzzy logic based controllers reducing the chattering in permanent state. The scheme has been implemented and experimentally validated.

A Model-Based Direct Power Control for Three-Phase Power Converters

The direct power control (DPC) technique has been widely used as a control strategy for three-phase power rectifiers due to its simplicity and good performance. DPC uses the instantaneous active and reactive power to control the power converter. The controller design has been proposed as a direct control with a lookup table and, in recent works, as an indirect control with an inner control loop with proportional-plus-integral controllers for the instantaneous active and reactive power errors. In this paper, a model-based DPC for three-phase power converters is designed, obtaining expressions for the input control signal, which allow the design of an adaptive control law that minimizes the errors introduced by parameter uncertainties as the smoothing inductor value or the grid frequency. A controller design process, a stability study of the system, and experimental results for a synchronous three-phase power rectifier prototype are presented to validate the proposed controller.

Analysis of the Power Balance in the Cells of a Multilevel Cascaded H-Bridge Converter

Multilevel cascaded H-bridge (CHB) converters have been presented as a good solution for high-power applications. In this way, several control and modulation techniques have been proposed for this power converter topology. In this paper, the steady-state power balance in the cells of a single-phase two-cell CHB is studied. The capability to be supplied with active power from the grid or to deliver active power to the grid in each cell is analyzed according to the dc-link voltages and the desired ac output voltage value. The limits of the maximum and minimum input active powers for a stable operation of the CHB are addressed. Simulation results are shown to validate the presented analysis.

A 3-D space vector modulation generalized algorithm for multilevel converters

A three-dimensional (3-D) space vector algorithm of multilevel converters for compensating harmonics and zero sequence in three-phase four-wire systems with neutral is presented. The low computational cost of the proposed method is always the same and it is independent of the number of levels of the converter. The conventional two-dimensional (2-D) space vector algorithms are particular cases of the proposed generalized modulation algorithm. In general, the presented algorithm is useful in systems with or without neutral, unbalanced load, triple harmonics and for generating 3-D control vectors.

Analysis and experimentation of nonlinear adaptive controllers for the series resonant converter

It is the purpose of this paper to explore the problem of regulating the output voltage of a DC-to-DC series resonant power converter (SRC). These converters have highly nonlinear dynamics fed by a bipolar square signal generator whose commuting frequency is the only accessible control variable in the control architecture that the authors study. Therefore, they are confronted with the problem of controlling a nonlinear switched system by means of a modulating frequency signal. Two more complications that make this problem more challenging are that the full state is typically not available for measurement, and that the output load, usually represented by a resistance, is unknown. They show here that-for constant control input-SRCs have a unique globally attractive periodic orbit, which motivates them to consider a first harmonic approximation of the system. They then prove that this reduced model consists of a known static nonlinearity in cascade with a first order system with unknown parameters, for which adaptive output feedback solutions can be derived. They propose two different schemes, first a passivity-based controller which, as usual in these schemes, achieves asymptotically the inversion of the nonlinearity. They prove that, under some practically reasonable considerations, this control law reduces to the dissipative controller recently proposed by Stankovic et al. The second scheme directly inverts the static nonlinearity and applies standard adaptive techniques to the resulting linear system. The three controllers are implemented in an experimental setup and the results are presented as a comparative study.

Improving transition between power optimization and power limitation of variable speed, variable pitch wind turbines using fuzzy control techniques

This paper presents an application of fuzzy controllers for improving wind energy capture for variable speed wind turbines. In recent works, it has been shown that variable speed wind turbines with torque and blade-pitch linear control provide an excellent performance of the closed loop system. However, this performance can be enhanced by using fuzzy control. In the present work, a computational fuzzy model is presented for a variable speed, variable pitch wind turbine. Simulation results show an excellent performance improving transition between power optimization and power limitation of the wind turbine, specially in the rated wind speed working conditions.

ASIC implementation of a digital tachometer with high precision in a wide speed range

A common method in adjustable speed drives uses an incremental shaft encoder and an electronic circuit for velocity estimation. The usual method of counting pulses coming from the encoder in a fixed period of time produces a high-precision velocity estimate in the high-speed range. High precision in the low-speed range can be achieved measuring the elapsed time between two successive pulses coming from the encoder. In this paper, a mixed method that combines the best of the two previously mentioned approaches has been implemented using a simple electronic circuit based on one field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and one read-only memory (ROM).