SBIR Phase I: Compact High efficiency Multilevel Motor Drive

这个小型企业创新研究（SBIR）第一阶段项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力将是使一个更小，更高效，更便宜的电机驱动器的新类别。由于电动机使用了全球43% - 46%的电力，由于该应用使用的功率量很大，因此效率的任何提高都有可能对整体电能效率产生最大的影响。使用这种技术的电机将是变速的，在许多应用中实现节能的机会。十年前，有一个推动集成驱动器和电机产品，但这失败了，至少在所有，但最小的电机。主要原因是驱动器更昂贵，并且在高功率应用中通常比电机本身更大。这造成了一种情况，即将驱动器和电机集成在一起没有技术或商业意义。从那时起，驱动器的成本和尺寸显著降低，但在实现显著的额外尺寸和成本降低之前，无法实现广泛集成的机会。该提案将显示这种集成适用于40- 1000 kW尺寸范围内的许多应用的路径。这个项目的智力价值包括一个新的方法来多级电机驱动器。 这种多电平技术还没有在低功率、低电压（1000 V）应用中找到商业应用，传统的两电平逆变器占据市场主导地位。这是由丰富的既定设计以及控制的简化和鲁棒性驱动的。随着控制和半导体尺寸和成本的不断降低，这些器件的尺寸和成本主要取决于滤波器和热驱动封装。 随着低尺寸和低成本数字控制技术的发展，在较低的电压和功率水平下实现多电平技术已经成为可能。在再生配置中的这种实施方式将显著降低滤波器要求，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，这种方法将大大减少最大和最昂贵物品的尺寸和成本，但代价是增加最小和最低成本物品的尺寸和成本。 该计划将开发方法和设计，可以实现比商业上高5-10倍的功率密度。

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.