Regulation of Multiphase Electric Drives: Introduction, Challenges and Trends
Abstract:
Multiphase electric drives (MED) have reemerged in the last two decades with an increasing interest from both academia and industry. As an introduction, the presentation will initially show some key aspects of multiphase electric machines, highlighting their main distinctive features compared to their three-phase counterparts and reviewing recent industrial applications for the propulsion in electric transportation. Focusing on the regulation of MED, some generalities of high-performance control techniques will be presented, with a special emphasis on the description of Model Predictive Control (MPC) and its evolution in the last decade. The talk will then continue with the description of fault-tolerant strategies in the event of open-phase faults, including control approaches with fault detection/reconfiguration and universal strategies (i.e., natural/passive fault tolerance). Finally, the last part of the presentation will be focused on the challenges and trends for MED, including some hints on how to revisit the control strategies when they are operated at high switching frequencies with converters based on Silicon Carbide (SiC) power switches.
About the speaker:
Mario J. Duran (Spain, 1975) received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in engineering from the University of Malaga in 1999 and 2003, respectively. He is currently a Full Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Malaga, being the head of the pioneering Laboratory on Advanced Electric Drives (3507 LII) and responsible of five national projects in the last decade. With multiple stays in the most prestigious institutions worldwide (e.g., Ryerson University, Liverpool John Moores University, Imperial College, UTFSM, University of Bologna), his research activity has been shared with more than 45 international co-authors and has covered topics related to the control of multiphase wind energy conversion systems and electric vehicle propulsion systems, both in healthy and fault-tolerant modes. The research production has been extensive (>100 JCR papers) and has had a deep impact in the area, being cited from 85 countries and 206 affiliations. With an h-index = 48 (Google Scholar), he has also been included in the Stanford list of most influencing researchers (within 1% worldwide in 2023). The research results have also obtained different recognitions, including the best paper Award in IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics (2010) for the first implementation of Model Predictive Control (MPC) in Multiphase Electric Drives (MED), Awards from IET Electric Power Applications for the best papers in 2013 and 2019, Awards from the University of Malaga (best young researcher in 2014 and best lecturer in 2021) and from the Government of Paraguay (2022). His current research activity deals with the regulation of multiphase electric motors for the development of ultra-efficient electric propulsion systems.