Development of Voltage Controller and Fault Analysis of Self Excited Induction Generator System

Abstract

Increasing fuel cost and attempt to get pollution free environment, renewable sources of energy such as the wind, solar, micro-hydro, tidal wave, and biomass, etc. have grabbed recently the attention of researchers. Among these available energy resources, the use of wind energy is growing rapidly to generate and supply electricity as grid connected or stand alone mode. To generate electric power from such non-conventional sources, self-excited induction generator (SEIG) is found to be a suitable option for either using in grid connected mode or isolated mode. Selection of SEIG in these areas depends on its advantages such as low cost, less maintenance, and absence of DC excitation. High maintenance and installation costs including transmission losses of conventional power supply to remote or isolated place by means of power grid can be reduced by installing stand-alone wind driven SEIG system at those places. In the year of 1935, self-excitation concept in squirrel cage induction machine with capacitors at their stator terminals was introduced by Basset and Potter. But the problems associated with SEIG are its poor voltage and frequency regulation under load and prime mover speed perturbations which put a limit on the use of SEIG for a long time. By controlling active and reactive power accurately, it is possible to regulate frequency and voltage of SEIG terminal during load and speed perturbations. Various efforts have been put by researchers in developing SEIG voltage and frequency controller but these control schemes demand multiple sensors along with complex electronic circuits.This dissertation presents some studies and development of new voltage controller of the SEIG system for balanced resistive, R − L and induction motor (IM) load that is used in isolated or remote areas. So in this context, an attempt is taken to develop an optimized voltage controller for SEIG using Generalized Impedance Controller (GIC) with a single closed loop. Stable zones of proportional and integral gains for GIC based SEIG system are computed along with parameter evaluation of the GIC based SEIG system. Further, Particle Swarm Optimization(PSO) technique is used to compute the optimal values of proportional and integral gains within the stable zone. The research work on SEIG system is extended to develop a voltage controller for SEIG with minimum number of sensors to make the system less complex and cost effective. Here, a voltage peak computation technique is developed using Hilbert Transform and computational efficient COordinate Rotation DIgital Computer (CORDIC) which requires only one voltage sensor and processed to control SEIG voltage for GIC based SEIG system. This voltage control scheme is implemented on commercially available TMS320F2812 DSP processor and performed laboratory experiment to study the performance of GIC based SEIG system during load switching. The work of this thesis is not confined only to study an optimal and simple voltage controller for SEIG system but also extended to investigate the fault identification methodologies of SEIG system. Here, the features of non-stationary SEIG signal with faults are extracted using Hilbert-Huang Transform (HHT). Further, different classifiers such as MultiLayer Perceptron (MLP) neural network, Probabilistic Neural Network (PNN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Least Square Support Vector Machine (LS-SVM) are used to identify faults of SEIG system. In this study, it is observed that LS-SVM among above classifiers provides higher classification accuracy of 99.25%.