SBIR Phase I: Compact High efficiency Multilevel Motor Drive

这个小企业创新研究（SBIR）第一阶段项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力将是使新型更小、更高效、更便宜的电机驱动器得以制造出来。由于电机使用世界上43% - 46%的电力，任何效率的提高都有可能对整体电能效率产生最大的影响之一，因为这种应用使用的电力量很大。使用这种技术的电机将是变速的，在许多应用中可以节省能源。十年前，曾有一股推动集成驱动和电机产品的热潮，但这种努力失败了，至少在除最小的电机以外的所有产品上都失败了。主要原因是驱动器更昂贵，并且在大功率应用中通常比电机本身更大。这造成了一种情况，它没有使技术或商业意义整合驱动和电机。从那时起，驱动器的成本和尺寸已经大大减少，但要实现广泛集成的机会，必须实现显著的额外尺寸和成本降低。该提案将展示这种集成适用于40-1000kW尺寸范围内的许多应用的路径。该项目的智力价值包括多级电机驱动的新方法。这种多电平技术还没有在低功率、低电压（1000V）应用中找到商业应用，传统的两电平逆变器主导着市场。这是由大量已建立的设计以及控制的简化和健壮性所驱动的。随着控制和半导体尺寸和成本的不断减小，这些器件的尺寸和成本主要由滤波器和热驱动封装主导。随着低尺寸和低成本数字控制技术的进步，现在可以在较低的电压和功率水平下实现多电平技术。这种再生配置的实现将大大减少对过滤器的要求，并提高驱动器和电机的效率。效率的提高与更广泛地分配开关热量相结合，将允许更小更紧凑的热解决方案。因此，这种方法将以增加最小和成本最低的项目的尺寸和成本为代价，显著减少最大和最昂贵项目的尺寸和成本。该计划将开发能够实现比商用功率密度高5-10倍的方法和设计。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will be in enabling a new class of smaller, more efficient, and cheaper motor drives to be built. Since the motors use 43% - 46% of the world's electricity, any improvement in efficiency has the potential to have one of the greatest impacts on overall electrical energy efficiency due to the shear amount of power this application uses. Motors using this technology will be variable speed enabling energy saving opportunities in many applications. A decade ago, there was a push for integrated drive and motor products, but this failed, at least in all but the smallest motors. The primary reasons were the drive was more expensive and often larger than the motor itself in high power applications. This created a situation where it did not make technical or commercial sense to integrate the drive and the motor. Since that point the cost and size of the drives has reduced significantly, but the opportunity for widespread integration cannot be realized until significant additional size and cost reduction is achieved. This proposal will show a path that this integration works for many applications in the 40-1000kW size range. The intellectual merit of this project includes a new approach to multilevel motor drives. This multilevel technology has not found commercial applications in lower power, lower voltage (1000V) applications, with traditional two level inverters dominating the market. This is driven by the abundance of established designs as well as the simplification and robustness of control. As control and semiconductor size and costs continue to reduce, the size and cost of these devices are dominated by filters and thermally driven packaging. With the advances in low size and cost digital control it now becomes possible to implement multilevel technologies at lower voltage and power levels. This implementation in a regenerative configuration will dramatically reduce the filter requirements as well as improve efficiency in both the drive and the motor. The efficiency improvement in conjunction with distributing the switch heat more widely will allow smaller more compact thermal solutions. Therefore, this approach will dramatically reduce the size and cost of the largest and most costly items at the expense of increasing the size and cost of the smallest and lowest cost items. This program will develop methodologies and designs that can achieve power densities that are 5-10 times higher than commercially available.