Curriculum and Laboratory Development

Inverter Project

Under the leadership of Jonathan Kimball, a project team of six graduate students, plus several undergraduates who assisted in the construction and assembly of the finished units, designed a modular inverter. The complete system is composed of a power front-end (including a rectifier and boost converter), a four-phase inverter, and a DSPbased control module. The overall system provides much more flexibility than a commercial inverter. Three students are using inverters to further their research. The primary objective of this project was to enable researchers to progress quickly from simulations to hardware. Using several software packages in conjunction, a researcher can now go from a simulation in MATLAB/ Simulink to compiled firmware for the DSP in the control module. This method has been used by Guoliang Zhang and Zakdy Sorchini to implement advanced motor control algorithms. The power front-end, designed by Wayne Weaver, has the flexibility to implement a power buffer. Documentation has been published as Grainger CEME Technical Report UILU ENG 2006-2504, CEME TR 0601 to enable future researchers to use and debug these systems. The team presented a seminar on May 8 to speed researchers up the learning curve.

2005-2006 Projects

• Magnetic Equivalent Circuits Applied to Induction Machine Design
• Mathematical Field Computation as an Analytical Tool for Electric Machines
• An Extended Field Reconstruction Technique for Optimization of Permanent Magnet Synchronous Machine Drive Systems
• A Framework for the Analysis and Design of Vector Controllers for Induction Machines
• Hand-Cranked Electric Generator to Poper Remote Off-Grid Villages