THE POWER OF CT INDUSTRY!

The newly-established Connecticut chapter of the IEEE Power Electronics Society (PELS) is very pleased to invite you to our special, inaugural event!!! Please join us and a full cast of Connecticut industrial and academic stakeholders for the big kickoff party at one of the University of Connecticut’s (UConn) newest hubs for innovation. Come mingle with the major players of all corners of CT industry and even beyond, including the likes of Sikorsky, Lockheed Martin, Otis Elevator Company, Collins Aerospace, Pratt & Whitney, Raytheon, Triumph Group, Eversource, General Dynamics/Electric Boat, and academic luminaries from UConn, Central Connecticut State University, and many more from the region (including greater New England and New York).

Thanks to incredible co-sponsors, the new CT PELS chapter wants to share this kickoff party with you by starting with a networking reception (including full food and drink) to mingle with other professionals and students. There will be student posters and demonstrations to check out before getting to the main event, our featured guest speaker. Everything (even the parking!) will be at no cost to attendees! This means space is limited and though free, you must pre-register to attend.

We are excited and honored to have the legendary Lockheed Martin Fellow, Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering (CASE) member, member of National Academy of Engineering and IEEE Fellow, Dr. Vladimir Blasko to speak on the topic of “Control and Tracking of Periodic Waveforms and Disturbance Elimination in 3-Phase Converters and Drives.” Additional event details can be found below.

Talk Title:

Control and Tracking of Periodic Waveforms and Disturbance Elimination in 3-Phase Converters and Drives

Abstract:

Over last 50 years industrial drives have been subject to significant development and improvements. The development was driven primarily by the advances or power electronics devices transitioning from thyristors with soft switching commutation over silicon-based junction device (slow BJT and faster IGBTs), towards modern nowadays drives, with SiC and GaN, very fast switching - channel devices. Power devices have been driving size, efficiency, and the development of power converter topologies. Operation and performances were further significantly influenced by advancements in control hardware (combinations of microprocessors and FPGAs) and control algorithms with model-based design, reaching nowadays amazing flexibility and creativity in implementation.

A historic perspective, evolution, and common theoretical framework for control, tracking and elimination of periodic disturbances/harmonics with arbitrary waveforms with focus on applications in electrical drives and power electronics will be presented. Three different approaches from three different fields, namely from classical-general-control, electrical drives and adaptive noise canceling will be analyzed.

The internal model principle, originating from control community, will be introduced first as it provides a general and elegant solution for tracking and elimination of (a) DC type of signals (b) harmonic - sine and cosine signals and (c) repetitive - arbitrary periodic waveforms. After that, as a second approach, the synchronous reference frame current regulators are reviewed as broadly used and still dominant for current control in electrical drives. The synchronous regulators have difficulty to control distorted current having direct and inverse components. As a remedy, a combination of two separate synchronous regulators rotating in synchronous frames aligned with direct and inverse components are combined. It be shown that after the transformation of integral parts of combined direct and inverse synchronous regulators into stationary reference frame, a single harmonic regulator in stationary reference is derived. Adaptive Noise Canceling (ANC) algorithm broadly used in digital signal and acoustic noise processing will be discussed as a third option and demonstrated for current control and selective harmonic elimination in grid tied inverters. It will be shown that linear combiner and lest mean square (LMS) algorithm as parts of ANC have the same transfer function as a harmonic regulator and therefore can perform the same function.

High level of similarity and results between the approaches in three different fields (control, signal processing and power electronics) will be shown and performances of different regulators demonstrated through simulation. Experimental results will be presented to demonstrate performances and capability.

About the speaker:

Dr. Vladimir Blasko received PhD, MSc and BSc, from the University of Zagreb, Croatia all in Electrical Engineering. He holds the position of LM Fellow at Sikorsky Aircraft Corp. Previously he was a Senior Fellow, Fellow and Power Electronics group leader at United Technologies Research Center, Fellow and Principal Engineer at Otis Elevator Company, Principal Engineer at Rockwell Automation - Allen Bradley Co all in USA, and Research Engineer at Koncar Co, Zagreb, Croatia. He is IEEE Life Fellow and a member of National Academy of Engineering (NAE) USA and a member of Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering (CASE). He holds the position of Adjunct Professor at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Dr. Blasko has published more than 50 papers and holds more than 30 patents. His areas of research interest are electrical aircraft power propulsion, power electronics, modern AC drives, distributed energy systems, and applied modern control theory and technology.