Power-Loss Ride-Through with Reduced Number of Voltage Sensors in a Cascaded H-Bridge Inverter fed Vector Controlled Induction Motor Drive

Abstract

Cascaded H-Bridge (CHB) inverter-fed drives are quite popular in high-power industrial applications. However, these drives are extremely sensitive to power supply disturbances on the input grid side, such as voltage sags or short-duration power interruptions that cause the drive to trip on under-voltage protection resulting in production losses. Therefore, it is necessary to employ techniques that improve the resilience of the drive by enabling it to smoothly ‘ride-through’ such short-duration disturbances. The traditional ride-through solutions in CHB drives typically necessitate additional hardware or multiple DC link voltage sensors, which increase the cost and complexity of the system. This paper proposes a simple and cost-effective approach for power-loss ride-through in CHB inverter based vector-controlled induction motor drives. In this method, the kinetic energy stored in the rotating mass is recovered and fed back to the DC-link capacitors to keep all the DC link voltages constant during momentary supply interruptions or voltage sags. The proposed technique works by controlling the voltage space phasor without the need for extra hardware and voltage sensors at the CHB cells. The proposed scheme is experimentally validated on a 30 kW, 7-level CHB inverter based vector controlled induction motor drive.