Development of spar engineering's next generation variable frequency drives

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There has been widespread use of Variable Frequency Drives (VFD) devices in recent years due to theeconomic advantages they offer in achieving energy-efficient operation. As a result, VFDs are indispensablecomponents of many industry applications such as pumps, compressors, chillers, fans, blowers, crushers, andconveyors. The supporting organization, SPAR Engineering provides consulting and design engineering services in the areas of electrical, control, and automation, in various industries such as mining, utilities, oil and gas, pulp and paper, energy, and water/waste management. The company has built and utilized a proprietary VFD design in their projects which is over 10 years old. With the advent of new microcontrollers and emerging methods for controlling VFDs, the company is in the process of refining the previous designs and offering its next generation of VFDs. The requested funding is to enable the SFU researchers to work closely with the company to develop its next generation VFD unit. The present drive can operate in both six and twelve pulse non-regenerative modes but is using a relatively old embedded control technology. Furthermore, to have a competitive edge, the company wants to implement recent advances in control algorithms into the new product. This needs new breeds of microprocessors with much higher density and completely different architectures than what is currently being used. The objective of the current CRD application is to develop the control, power electronics, and user interface hardware for the company's next generation VFDs. In particular, we will develop advanced capabilities such as Direct Torque Control, Regenerative Braking, Multilevel Inverter for application to high power drives which consider reliability and fault tolerance in the design.