Title:

PID and Predictive Control for Electrical Drives Using MATLAB

Abstract:

Since more than 20 years the so-called Field Oriented Control is a standard for controlled electrical
drives.

Today, strategies based on this principle fulfil nearly all demands of drive industry. However, the
performance of Field Oriented Controllers cannot be improved any more without limitations.

Model Predictive Controllers (MPC) are based on a rather old approach whose first ideas have been
published in the 1960s.

Control strategies of this type are characterised by an explicitly and separately identifiable model of
the controlled system. This model is used to pre calculate the behaviour of the plant and therewith
also to choose an optimal value of the control variable.

In contrast to conventional predictive controllers used for drive control, which generally pre
calculate only for a single sample step in advance, Model Predictive Controllers regard the control
system behaviour over a long time into the future. Hence, these strategies are also known as Long-
Range Predictive Control (LRPC) in literature.

MPC methods have gained much importance in the field of process engineering. It is not known that
they have been used for drive control so far, since the huge mathematical effort that is necessary to
perform the calculation of the future system behaviour, collides with the demand for high sampling
rates in drive control. The project shows that it is possible to move a huge part of the calculational
effort offline so that the remaining part can be easily calculated in a feasible time frame, even for
drive control.

Electrical drives play a critical role in electromechanical energy conversions. They are seen
everywhere in our daily life from the cooling fans, washing machines to computers. They are the
fundamental building blocks in manufacturing, transportation, mineral processing, wind energy and
many other industries. For the last several decades, the advances of electronically switched
semiconductors in the form of power electronics have made AC motor drives gain more prominence
over the DC machines in industries since they allow a direct connection to power grids via grid
connected power converters and have a more reliable physical structure. The grid connected three
phase power converter has wide applications in renewable energy generation. Since PID control
systems are used in the majority of industrial electrical drives and power converters, understanding
these control systems and having the capability to design and implement them are important to a
control engineer.