Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Measurement
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/measurement
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Received 22 April 2011
Received in revised form 12 August 2011
Accepted 26 September 2011
Available online 12 October 2011
Keywords:
Variable voltage variable frequency power
source
Sinusoidal pulse width modulation
Microcontroller
MOSFET H-bridge inverter
LCD display
a b s t r a c t
The present paper describes the development of a low cost, microcontroller-based variable
voltage variable frequency sinusoidal power source, which is the demand of the day for
various applications. The power source is developed using MOSFET H-bridge inverter
and with a stand alone LCD display system. The design methodology proposes to utilize
a novel concept of generating sinusoidal pulse width modulation signals for the driver circuit of the inverter. The system proposes to incorporate a ROM-based LUT within the
power source itself for the sinusoidal signal generation with enhanced stability. This low
cost, yet accurate power source has been successfully developed for wide range of voltage
commands (3080 V rms) and frequency commands (4070 Hz), and their real-life performances in voltage wave generation were also found to be quite satisfactory.
2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
The efcient use of available power for various types of
demand has remained an important issue in electrical
engineering domain and hence has attracted attention
from many research communities all over the world. The
focus has very often been to develop dedicated types of
power sources according to specic, tailor-made demands.
Very often, such requirements are specied in form of generation of ac sources having variable magnitude, variable
frequency and different types of waveform shapes [15].
Depending on requirement, there may be design and
development of single phase [1,3] or three phase power
sources [2,4,5]. Studies and analyses of suitable power converters in this regard have been going on for quite some
time [68]. Such power sources will be specically useful
in characterization of performance of ac sources, e.g., in
three phase induction motor drive traction and also in torque and speed control, single phase induction motor for
residential applications. The quality of electrical power
developed is gradually becoming a matter of major concern as the new generation equipments installed for
increasing productivity very often turn out to be the major
sources of creating additional power quality problems.
Hence, in an overall consideration, design of high quality,
variable voltage variable frequency (VVVF) power source
with a wide range of peak-to-peak pure sine waveforms,
with a wide range of frequency and with minimum distortion in the generated waveform, still remains a major
challenge.
In [1], a DSP-based variable ac source was developed
using sliding mode control and Kalman lter methodology.
This system achieved harmonic distortion of less than 2%
in steady state response, while driving a linear, resistive
load. In [3], a microcontroller-based variable frequency
power inverter design was proposed for both single-phase
and three-phase systems. The microcontroller was used to
provide the pulse width modulation (PWM) signal for gate
voltage control drive of the IGBT inverter bridge. However,
this system was only implemented in simulation. In [4], a
three phase stable VVVF power source was developed
using a class D topology of power ampliers and hysteresis
control strategy. In [5], a microcontroller-based three
phase, three level voltage source inverter was developed
60
230V
50Hz
Voltage
Control
Opto-isolated
Variable DC Source
Microcontrollerbased Voltage
Controller with
Feed-forward
Compensation
MOSFET H-bridge
Isolation
Transformer
Variable Voltage
Variable Frequency
AC Output
Filter
High-side/Lowside Driver
Stepdown
Transformer and
Rectifier
Frequency
Control
Fig. 1. The overall block diagram of the VVVF power source developed.
Fig. 2. An actual photograph of the power source: (a) uncovered view and
(b) encased view.
61
Zero crossing
detector
To opto-isolated
variable DC source
PIC12F675
+5V
7805
230V
50Hz
9V
Triac
From Voltage
Controller
Full-wave Rectifier
P
MOC3023
Random-phase
Opto-isolator
230V
50Hz
N
Choke
+
-
Variable DC
output
In5408
4A/800V
+5V
+5V
Offset
adjustment
CCP1
AN0
CCP2
18F2520
Port B
10 MHz
Fig. 5a. Microcontroller-based PWM drive designed.
62
+5V
From Stepdown
Transformer and
Rectifier
+5V
Frequency
Control
AN0
Output Voltage
Display Scale-factor
Adjustment
AN1
18F2520
8-bit Frequency data
to PWM drive
Port B
To LCD Display
Port C
Hence, the ring delay varies as a linear weighted combination of the voltage control signal and the feed forward
signal. Here, K0 determines the minimum output voltage,
i.e., the offset in the ring delay in absence of any voltage
control and feed forward signal. Similarly, K1 inuences
the required span of output voltage variation, and K2 inuences the amount of compensation required.
3. The power circuit design
A detail schematic description of the power circuit is
given in Fig. 4. Here, the FVFF ac power at 230 V, 50 Hz is
applied to the voltage regulator with feed forward compensator such that the output voltage can be controlled
+5V
4.7K /0.25W
+5V
4.7K
11
12
13
14
15
16
11
12
13
14
6
4
162 LCD
Display
JHD162A
15
1
+5V
16
Display contrast
adjustment
potentiometer
(Preset)
63
MOSFET. When the driver circuit sends pulse to a particular MOSFET, it immediately turns ON, and when the pulse
is withdrawn, the MOSFET is turned OFF. This sequence of
switching is so designed that, at a particular switching instant, a pair of MOSFETs (say MOSFET1 and MOSFET4) is in
ON condition and the other pair (MOSFET2 and MOSFET3)
is in OFF condition. In the next switching instant, just the
reverse happens, i.e., MOSFET2 and MOSFET3 are turned
ON and MOSFET1 and MOSFET4 are turned OFF. Here, each
MOSFET is protected by an R-C snubber circuit. The VVVF
output from the power source is obtained by tapping the
AC output from the MOSFET H-bridge inverter through
an isolation transformer, which is equipped with a lter
bank in its secondary side.
+12V
0.1F/30V
Disc
100F/35V
+5V
UF4007
G1
Zener
Disc
18V/1W
10F/
35V
0.5 F/30V
UF4007
S1
0.5F/30V
Disc
10F/
35V
UF4007
G2
10 /0.25W
S2
+12V
0.1F/30V
Disc
+5V
100F/35V
UF4007
10 /0.25W
G3
18V/1W
Zener
10F/
35V
0.5F/30V
Disc
UF4007
IR2110
10F/
35V
0.25
0.25
S3
0.5F/30V
Disc
IR2110
UF4007
0.25W
Shut Down
2N2222
G4
S4
0.25W
2N2222
From
Protection Circuit
+5V
0.25W
64
DPWM
Wattmeter
P.C.
AC Supply
230V,50Hz
2 Offset=DPWM P
2
Variable Voltage
Variable
Frequency
Power Source
C.C.
N1 N2
Vrms
A
Lloyd-Fisher
Magnetic
Square
V av
65
Fig. 11. DC output vs. line voltage variation for different voltage settings with feed forward compensation. (a) Captured waveform at 150 V (peak to peak)
and 40 Hz, (b) captured waveform at 150 V (peak to peak) and 50 Hz, (c) captured waveform at 150 V (peak to peak) and 60 Hz, (d) captured waveform at
150 V (peak to peak) and 70 Hz, (e) captured waveform at 200 V (peak to peak) and 40 Hz, (f) captured waveform at 200 V (peak to peak) and 50 Hz, (g)
captured waveform at 200 V (peak to peak) and 60 Hz, (h) captured waveform at 200 V (peak to peak) and 70 Hz.
66
Fig. 11 (continued)
(vi) the oating channel can be used to drive an N-channel power MOSFET in the high-side conguration
which operates up to 500 V.
In IR 2110, the output follows the input signal when the
shut down signal is low, but the output will be low if the
shut down signal is high.
6. Power supply circuit design
The scheme also utilizes a suitable power supply circuit
that is designed to provide the operating dc power to the
microcontrollers, driver chips, the display chip, op-amps,
etc. Here, a step down transformer receives the ac power
from the supply mains and reduces the voltage level. This
reduced voltage is rectied by a center tap full wave rectier to obtain dc which is then passed through two dc regulators, connected in cascade, to obtain both +12 V and
+5 V dc power supply. The circuit is developed using electrolytic capacitors to obtain smooth and ripple free dc
power supply. This dc power is made available through
3-pin relimate connector. Fig. 8 shows the schematic of
this power supply circuit designed.
7. Protection circuit design
A protection circuit is designed to protect the main circuit from several types of fault conditions, namely short
circuit fault, over load fault and over current fault. During
fault condition, heavy current will ow through the power
circuit. Due to this heavy current ow, the protection circuit will generate a signal that will be transmitted to the
shut down fault point of the driver circuit. Then, the driver
circuit will immediately deactivate the drives of the
MOSFETs of the power circuit. Fig. 9 shows this protection
circuit designed.
8. Experimental results
The performance of the designed variable voltage
variable frequency (VVVF) sinusoidal power source is
evaluated by utilizing it for a nonlinear load where the
source is utilized for Lloyd-Fisher square-based iron-loss
measurement of magnetic specimens and separation of
iron losses into hysteresis and eddy current losses, utilizing
wattmeter method. The experimental set up is shown in
Fig. 10. The arrangement is utilized for a voltage range of
(3080 V rms) and for a frequency range of 4070 Hz.
The gure of merit employed to quantitatively calculate
the performance of the system developed is the wellknown performance index of total harmonic distortion
(THD). The analysis is carried out where several real-life
waveforms are generated under different specied, desired
voltage and frequency commands. The qualities of those
generated waveforms are evaluated by calculating the
THD. The manufacturers and models of the instruments
employed in the measurement circuit to carry out these
experimentations include digital oscilloscope from Agilent
Technologies. Fig. 11 shows some sample, generated waveforms of the VVVF sinusoidal power source, captured using
Frequency (Hz)
THD (%)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
74.6
69.4
77.1
77.7
90.2
90.3
77.9
88.1
83.2
82.2
75.6
64.9
59.0
76.3
86.1
50.57
44.40
53.62
59.42
64.30
69.20
54.53
68.24
65.27
65.03
50.58
45.67
40.73
50.50
60.39
8.8
2.8
4.0
3.5
3.7
3.2
2.9
3.4
6.2
5.6
9.0
5.1
3.7
3.5
6.3
a digital storage oscilloscope. Table 1 shows the quantitative performance evaluation in some sample cases. Table 1
and Fig. 11 in combination demonstrate that the proposed
scheme can faithfully construct voltage waveforms over
the desired range of voltage and frequency commands.
Fig. 10 shows the utility of employing feed forward
compensation in conjunction with the voltage controller.
Here, the DC output voltage is plotted vs. line voltage variation for different voltage settings. This scheme is very
useful in those situations where the line voltage does not
remain steady at its nominal value (in our case, 230 V)
and undergoes variation, usually in the lower side. Had
there been no compensation provided, this curve would
have been a straight line passing through origin, with a
slope of 45 with the horizontal axis. With incorporation
of feed forward compensation, the scheme showed good
accuracy in providing almost a straight line variation parallel to the horizontal axis for different desired output DC
voltage settings (e.g. 160/180/200/220V DC).
9. Conclusion
A precision type, low cost, microcontroller-based variable voltage variable frequency sinusoidal power source
has been designed in this work. The developed scheme
has been successfully employed for an ac voltage range
of 3080 V rms and a frequency range of 4070 Hz. The
VVVF source has been developed employing MOSFET
H-bridge inverter, and it introduces a novel concept of
generating suitable PWM signals, called sinusoidal pulse
width modulation (SPWM) technique, where constant
amplitude pulses are generated with different duty cycles
for each period. Incorporation of a ROM-based LUT within
the power source itself provides additional robustness and
desired performance achieving capability for the proposed
scheme. The performance of the designed source has been
successfully demonstrated by its capability to faithfully
reproduce the commanded sine wave of desired amplitude
67
and frequency over their respective wide ranges. This provides a simple, accurate, easy in operation power source
which is a low cost solution compared to the standard,
off-the-self products readily available in the market. Some
of the commercially available products include those available from Agilent [16] (6811B AC Power Source/Power
Analyzer), California Instruments [17] (251 TL), etc. However, each such instrument is a high end equipment that
is highly expensive and may not be affordable for people
in the research communities or in small industries, purely
from the economic point of view. One of the main objectives of the present work is to offer them a readymade
solution, at a much cheaper price. The scheme has been
presently developed for generation of single phase ac voltages. The future scope of work will concentrate on development of similar power sources for generation of three
phase voltages.
References
[1] K-S. Low, A DSP-based variable AC power source, IEEE Transaction on
Instrumentation and Measurement 47 (4) (1998) 992996.
[2] A. Cheritti, K. Al-Haddad, L. Dessaint, D. Mukhedkar, V. Rajagopalan,
A variable frequency soft commutated voltage source inverter
delivering sinusoidal waveforms, industry applications society
annual meeting, in: Conference Record of the 1990 IEEE, vol. 1, pp.
697702.
[3] K.A. Madi-Ali, M.E. Salem Abozaed, Microcontroller based variable
frequency power inverter, in: Proc. International Multi Conference of
Engineers and Computer Scientists (IMECS), Hong Kong, March 17
19, 2010.
[4] F.R.S. Vincenzi et al., Programmable AC power source used to analyze
electronic equipment performance in the electrical power system
quality concept, in: Twenty-third Annual IEEE Applied Power
Electronics Conference and Exposition, 2008, pp. 19311937.
[5] E. Mahrous, N.A. Rahim, W.P. Hew, Three phase three level voltage
source inverter with low switching frequency based on the two-level
inverter topology, IET Electrical Power Applications 1 (4) (2007)
637641.
[6] Ned Mohan, Tore M. Undeland, William P. Robins, Power Electronics:
Converters, Applications, and Design, third ed., John Willy & Sons
(Asia) Private Limited, 2002.
[7] R.W. Erickson, D. Maksimovic, Fundamentals of Power Electronics,
second ed., Springer Science, 2001.
[8] M.H. Rashid, Power Electronics: Circuits, Devices and Applications,
third ed., Prentice Hall of India Private Limited, 2003.
[9] A. Deshmukh, Microcontroller Theory and Applications, Tata
McGraw-Hill Publishing Company Limited, New Delhi, 2007.
[10] Data Sheet of PIC 18F2520 Microcontroller from Microchip Inc.
<http://www.microcontroller.com>.
[11] Data Sheet of IR 2110 from International Rectier. <http://
www.irf.com/product-info/datasheets/data/ir2110.pdf>.
[12] Data Sheet of LCD Display JHD162A. <http://www.electrokit.se/
download/JHD162A%20SERIES.pdf>.
[13] D.N. Vizireanu, S.V. Halunga, Single sine wave parameters
estimation method based on four equally spaced samples,
International Journal of Electronics 98 (7) (2011) 941948.
[14] D.N. Vizireanu, A simple and precise real-time four point single
sinusoid signals instantaneous frequency estimation method for
portable DSP based instrumentation, Measurement 44 (2) (2011)
500502.
[15] R.M. Udrea, D.N. Vizireanu, Quantized multiple sinusoids signal
estimation algorithm, Journal of Instrumentation (2008) 17.
[16] http://www.home.agilent.com/.
[17] www.ProgrammablePower.com.