Dynamic Voltage Restorer (DVR) with a novel robust control strategy.

With the advancement of technology, electric equipment and loads have become more sensitive to problems related to power quality, such as voltage sag, swell, imbalances, and harmonics. To detect faults and to protect sensitive loads from these voltage distortions, a Dynamic Voltage Restorer (DVR) series compensator is among the best available cost-effective solutions. One of the main goals of the DVR is to achieve a control structure that is robust, stable, and can handle properly the disturbances (e.g., grid voltage issues, load current, and fluctuations at the DC link voltage) and model uncertainties (e.g., inverters and filter parameters). In this work, a novel framework control strategy based on Uncertainty and Disturbance Estimator (UDE) is proposed to improve the response of the DVR to properly compensate the load voltage under a variety of power quality issues, particularly the ones associated with the grid voltage disturbances. Additionally, the stability of the proposed control system is analyzed and validated using the Lyapunov stability theory. The advantages of the new control system are robustness, simplified design, good harmonic rejection, low tracking error, fast response, and sinusoidal reference tracking without the need for voltage transformations or specific frequency tuning (e.g., abc-dq0 and Proportional-Resonant). This research uses the MATLAB/Simulink software to validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme under a diverse set of conditions with no control limitations. Moreover, the designed controller is tested under real conditions using Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) validation with OPAL-RT real-time simulator coupled with a TI Launchpad microcontroller. The results demonstrate a good performance of the proposed control strategy for a quick transient response and a great harmonic rejection when subject to grid voltage distortions.

Development and testing of an active high voltage saturation probe for characterization of ultra-high voltage silicon carbide semiconductor devices.

Obtaining accurate collector to emitter voltage measurements when characterizing high voltage silicon carbide (SiC) devices requires the ability to measure voltages in the range of zero to 10 V while the device is in the on-state and the ability to withstand ultra-high voltages while the device is in the off-state. This paper presents a specialized voltage probe capable of accurately measuring the aforementioned range. A comparison is made between the proposed probe and other commonly used high voltage probe alternatives in relation to high voltage SiC device testing. Testing of the probe was performed to ensure linearity, high accuracy, and high bandwidth.

An evaluation system for experimental silicon and silicon carbide super gate turn off thyristors.

This paper describes the design and implementation of a small-scale pulsed power system specifically intended to evaluate the suitability of experimental silicon and silicon carbide high power Super Gate Turn Off thyristors for high action (500 A(2) s and above) pulsed power applications where energy is extracted from a storage element in a rapid and controlled manner. To this end, six of each type of device was placed in a controlled three phase rectifier circuit which was in turn connected to an aircraft ground power motor-generator set and subjected to testing protocols with varying power levels, while parameters such as offset firing angle were varied.

Automated modular high energy evaluation system for experimental thyristor devices.

A high energy, modular, completely automated test bed with integrated data acquisition and characterization systems was successfully designed in order to perform both safe operating area as well as very high volume reliability testing on experimental silicon carbide Super Gate Turn Off (SGTO) thyristors. Although the system follows a modular design philosophy, with each functional block acting as a peripheral to a main control module and can be adapted to arbitrary power and pulse width levels, for the specific SGTO devices initially evaluated it was configured to have the device discharge variable current levels of up to 6 kA into a 0.5 Ω resistive load with a relatively square pulse fixed at 100 µs full width at half maximum delivering energy levels up to 1.8 kJ to the load.