Abstract
This paper proposes and investigates an innovative methodology that can have a significant impact on the market potential of wound field, small–medium size synchronous generators (SGs). The technique proposed here is aimed at removing the need for the traditional stator skewing that is so commonly used in SGs to achieve acceptable values of voltage total harmonic distortion. To do this, a nonstandard damper cage configuration is proposed that comprises modulation of the damper bars’ positioning. An off-the-shelf, 400-kVA generator is used as a benchmark machine. Its rotor is optimized and modified according to the proposed technique. The results of the final machine are then compared to the benchmark machine highlighting the excellent advantages that can be achieved through this technique. A full-scale prototype of the modified generator is then built to experimentally validate the concept. Finally, a detailed analysis on all the performance aspects of the prototype is carried out, to guarantee that the proposed technique has no negative impact whatsoever on the generator's performance.
Highlights
A N essential component for any electrical power generation and power system is the wound-field, Manuscript received January 02, 2018; revised March 18, 2018 andJuly 2, 2018; accepted July 27, 2018.S
In [11], it was found that both damper cage currents and voltage THD can be minimized by opportunely modifying the amplitude and phase harmonic components of the equivalent functions involved in the inductance expression, including those describing the damper winding
Noticing the small values of the damper cage losses in relation to the SG rated power, it can be concluded that their impact on the machine efficiency can be neglected, justifying the main focus given to the THD minimization objective
Summary
A N essential component for any electrical power generation and power system is the wound-field, Manuscript received January 02, 2018; revised March 18, 2018 and. The ever-more stringent quality compliancy and grid-code standards [1], [2] are pushing the need for better power quality at all levels, including at component (SG) level [3] When it comes to relatively low-tomedium rated wound-field SGs, the most common/popular methodologies employed to improve their power quality performance in terms of voltage total harmonic distortion (THD), include 1) Special designs of the rotor geometry, where the shape of the salient poles is structured to have a non-constant airgap, resulting in improved output waveform shapes. This is a very popular optimization design process in SGs [4]. To the authors’ knowledge, no other existing work has proposed and validated such a technique as investigated in this work
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