The area of multiphase variable-speed motor drives in general and multiphase induction motor drives in particular has experienced a substantial growth since the beginning of this century. Research has been conducted worldwide and numerous interesting developments have been reported in the literature. An attempt is made to provide a detailed overview of the current state-of-the-art in this area. The elaborated aspects include advantages of multiphase induction machines, modelling of multiphase induction machines, basic vector control and direct torque control schemes and PWM control of multiphase voltage source inverters. The authors also provide a detailed survey of the control strategies for five-phase and asymmetrical six-phase induction motor drives, as well as an overview of the approaches to the design of fault tolerant strategies for post-fault drive operation, and a discussion of multiphase multi-motor drives with single inverter supply. Experimental results, collected from various multiphase induction motor drive laboratory rigs, are also included to facilitate the understanding of the drive operation.

A direct rotor-field-oriented control of a dual-three phase induction motor drive is described in this paper. The induction machine has two sets of stator three-phase windings spatially shifted by 30 electrical degrees. The stator windings are fed by a current-controlled pulsewidth-modulation (PWM) six-phase voltage-source inverter. Three key issues are discussed: (1) the machine dynamic model is based on the vector space decomposition theory; (2) the PWM strategy uses the double zero-sequence injection modulation technique which gives good results with low computational and hardware requirements; and (3) to eliminate the inherent asymmetries of the drive power section, a new current control scheme is proposed. Experimental results are presented for a 10-kW dual three-phase induction motor drive prototype.

Power electronic converters are commonly used for interfacing distributed generation (DG) systems to the electrical power network. This paper deals with a single-phase inverter for DG systems requiring power quality features, such as harmonic and reactive power compensation for grid-connected operation. The idea is to integrate the DG unit functions with shunt active power filter capabilities. With this approach, the inverter controls the active power flow from the renewable energy source to the grid and also performs the nonlinear load current harmonic compensation by keeping the grid current almost sinusoidal. The control scheme employs a current reference generator based on sinusoidal signal integrator and instantaneous reactive power (IRP) theory together with a dedicated repetitive current controller. Experimental results obtained on a 4-kVA inverter prototype demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed solution.

This paper proposes and formalizes a comprehensive experimental approach for the identification of the magnetic model of synchronous electrical machines of all kinds. The identification procedure is based on controlling the current of the machine under test while this is driven at constant speed by another regenerative electric drive. Compensation of stator resistance and inverter voltage drops, iron loss, and operating temperature issues are all taken into account. A road map for implementation is given, on different types of hardware setups. Experimental results are presented, referring to two test motors of small size, and references of larger motors identified with the same technique are given from the literature.

In high-performance control of ac machines through variable frequency drives, the knowledge of machine parameters plays a decisive role. The accuracy with which machine parameters can be known is directly related to the time and effort put in testing and commissioning process. In the ever-demanding industrial environments, the time spent on parameter identification translates into loss of production. To reduce commissioning times, research in this direction has focused on automatizing the identification procedure without loss of accuracy. This paper reviews different lines of research adopted over the past few decades for machine parameter identification. Parameter estimation of ac machines is considered because of their widespread applications from servomechanisms to traction to aviation. The surveyed works include self-commissioning schemes that have become an integral part and salient feature of modern electric drives. This feature enables the drives to automatically identify machine parameters and tune the control loops.

A direct torque control (DTC) strategy for dual three-phase induction motor drives is discussed in this paper. The induction machine has two sets of stator three-phase windings spatially shifted by 30 electrical degrees. The DTC strategy is based on a predictive algorithm and is implemented in a synchronous reference frame aligned with the machine stator flux vector. The advantages of the discussed control strategy are constant inverter switching frequency, good transient and steady-state performance, and low distortion of machine currents with respect to direct self-control (DSC) and other DTC schemes with variable switching frequency. Experimental results are presented for a 10-kW DTC dual three-phase induction motor drive prototype.