Grants and Contributions:

Grant or Award spanning more than one fiscal year. (2017-2018 to 2022-2023)

To meet the growing demand for electrical energy while reducing environmental impact, electrical systems of the future will need to be much more energy efficient. High-power electric motor drives are the major consumers of electrical energy and they have significant potential for improvement in terms of energy saving. The key to this improvement is advances in power electronics technology. The proposed research will focus on advancing the state-of-the-art in power electronic technologies that operate in the medium-voltage (MV) range (2.3 to 15kV) for motor drive applications.

High-power MV drives have a wide range of applications in the oil and gas, chemicals, mining and metals, cement, power generation and utilities, traction, and food and beverage industries. Energy efficiency, power quality, cost, size, reliability, fault protection, and easy installation and maintenance are the main challenges in the development of power electronics for high-power MV motor drives. Although existing MV power electronic converters based on the concept of multilevel structure have advantages over the conventional converters, their voltage level is still limited to 6.9kV. This is because of the limitation in voltage rating of the available power semiconductors in the market and the structure of the current multilevel MV power converters. The existing solutions for higher voltage need to employ a complex transformer, which is not efficient, or use a modular topology with a significant increase in the number of components which is not cost-effective and reliable.

The proposed research program will focus on a novel family of modular and scalable power conversion structure for further expansion of MV drives for higher voltage (>6.9kV) applications with improved efficiency, performance, cost, size, weight, reliability, and fault detection capability. It is expected that the theoretical results and the successful implementation of this proposed research program will provide a new set of power electronic topologies and advanced control techniques to introduce new technologies in the area of high-power MV drives which will produce significant energy savings for all sectors using industrial electric motors. This research program will also help to educate the next generation of power engineers with required knowledge and technical skills to contribute to local and national businesses and industries.