PWM Techniques for Control of Dual-Inverter Supplied Six-Phase Drives

Among the different multiphase ac drive solutions, one of the most widely reported in the literature is the six-phase machine. The machines can be realised into two different configurations, symmetrical and asymmetrical. For the symmetrical configuration, the stator winding consists of two sets of three-phase windings that are spatially shifted by 60 degrees where spatial displacement between any two consecutive phases is the same and equal to 60 degrees. For the asymmetrical configuration, the two sets of three-phase windings are spatially shifted by 30 degrees. As a result, the spatial shift between consecutive phases becomes non-equidistant.In this thesis, modulation techniques for both symmetrical and asymmetrical six-phase machines are investigated. The machines are configured in open-end winding configuration where both ends of the stator winding are connected to separate isolated inverters in a topology known as dual-inverter supply. Compared to conventional single-sided supply topology where one end of the winding is connected to an inverter while the other side is star-connected, some additional benefits are offered by the dual-inverter supply topology. First, fault tolerance of the drive is improved, since the supply is realised with two independent inverters. In case one of the inverters is faulted, the other can continue to provide power to the machine. Second, the same phase voltages can be achieved with half the dc-link voltages on the two inverter inputs compared to the single-sided supply, which can be useful in applications such as electric and hybrid electric vehicles and medium sized ships, where the dc voltage levels are limited. Further, due to the nature of the topology, additional diodes and capacitors like in the Neutral Point Clamped (NPC) and Flying Capacitor (FC) VSIs are not required. The latter results in a further advantage - capacitor voltage balancing techniques are not required.Two pulse width modulation (PWM) techniques for control of the dual-inverter supplied six-phase drives are proposed in this thesis. The first is a reference sharing algorithm where the inverters are modulated using reference voltage that is shared equally and unequally between the two modulators. For both symmetrical and asymmetrical six-phase drives, a better performance, in term of total harmonic distortion (THD) of phase voltage is obtained when the reference is shared unequally between the two modulators. The second technique is carrier-based modulation where the modulation of the two inverters is determined by the disposition of the carrier signals. Three variations of carrier signals disposition are investigated namely; the phase disposition (PD-PWM), alternate phase opposition disposition (APOD-PWM) and phase-shifted PWM (PS-PWM). For the symmetrical six-phase drive, the best phase voltage and current THDs are obtained using APOD-PWM while for asymmetrical six-phase drive, the APOD-PWM produces the worst current THD despite having the best voltage THD among the three methods.All the developed modulation techniques are analysed using simulations and experiments undertaken using a laboratory prototypes. The waveforms and spectra of phase voltage and load current obtained from the simulation and experimental works are presented in this thesis together with the THD of both the voltage and current over entire linear modulation range