Retrofit Control to Prevent ASD Nuisance Tripping Due to Power Quality Problems

Abstract

Since the onset of automation, industry has relied on adjustable speed drives to accurately control the speed of motors. Recent advances have increased the number of adjustable speed drives hitting the market. The proper operation of the speed drives requires electrical supply with relatively high power quality which is not the case in most industrial facilities. Power quality problems such as harmonic, sag, swell, flicker, and unbalance can trip the speed drive with a wrong message, which is referred as a premature tripping. Although the power quality problems can be mitigated by using custom power devices, they are bulky and costly. Moreover, they themselves might adversely affect the operation of the adjustable speed drive. A comprehensive study done in this thesis presents the overlooked effect of the custom power devices on the speed drive stability. It is found that the speed drive system might trip due to its interaction with custom power devices. Obviously, it is vital to increase ASD immunity to premature tripping because of poor power quality or custom power.

This thesis offers fast, efficient and robust algorithms to achieve this immunity by retrofitting the ASD control unit and integrating the power conditioning function with the adjustable speed drive. Therefore, the power quality problem is mitigated and the drive system performance is significantly enhamced. Such integration requires the modification of the control unit by considering various elements such as envelope tracking, phase-locked loop, symmetrical component extraction, and the controller. Simple but robust and fast algorithms are proposed for such elements based on a newly developed energy operator algorithm. The developed energy operator and the developed algorithms overcome the drawbacks of the existing algorithms.