EE 214 Design Project

1 Problem Denition and Design Goals

In this project, you will design and implement a DC to three-phase inverter. In other words your circuit will generate three-phase alternating current from a DC power supply. A DC to three-phase inverter has many practical usages especially in cars using electric motors for traction. For instance, hybrid, solar, and fuel cell cars all use electric motors for traction. Three-phase AC motors have many advantages over other types of electric motors, such as eciency, reduced vibrations, and service costs. Hence, the preferred type of motors used in these cars are three-phase AC motors. On the other hand, these cars require a medium of energy storage and all of the available energy storage devices operate in DC. Hence, these cars require an inverter to transform the DC voltage stored in the batteries to three-phase AC voltage to drive the motor(s) of the car. There are mainly three design goals to be achieved while designing a DC to three-phase inverter. These goals are eciency, balanced output, and reduced distortion. When the record braking oil prices and the global warming is considered, the eciency of an inverter becomes the most important design criterion. The eciency of an inverter is dened as the ratio of real power delivered to the three phase load to the total power used by the inverter. An inverter with low eciency increases the fuel costs of a hybrid car and decreases the range of the solar or fuel cell cars. Moreover, low eciency of an inverter means that excessive amount of heat is generated somewhere in the inverter circuit which is a very severe problem to deal with. In practical inverter circuits eciency is in the order of 90%. The second important design goal is to make the output of the inverter as balanced as possible. A DC to three-phase inverter should generate three sinusoidal voltage waveforms which are equal in amplitude and 120o apart in phase ideally. However, in practice it is quite dicult to satisfy these requirements exactly. Both the amplitudes of the three waveforms may be slightly vary and their phase dierences may be slightly dierent than 120o . An unbalanced output causes vibrations and heat in the motor and hence decreases the eciency of the whole system and reduces the lifetime of the electric motor. Hence, an engineer should make the amplitudes of the three waveforms as close as possible and the phase dierences between them as close as possible to 120o . The nal design goal of a DC to three phase inverter is reducing the distortion or the higher order harmonic components in the output. Ideally, a DC to three phase inverter should generate three sinusoidal waveforms. However, this is not possible in practice. The deviation from the true sinusoid is measured with the higher order harmonic components in the output. If the three outputs are not pure sinusoids, the output will be unbalanced even if the amplitudes of the waveforms are equal and the phase dierences between them are 120o . Hence, the higher order harmonics have the same adverse eects with the unbalanced output. However, the eects of the higher order harmonics is much less severe than unequal amplitudes and phase dierences not equal to 120o . Similar to all problems in engineering, there is always a trade o between

these design goals and the simplicity of the inverter. A highly ecient DC to three-phase inverter with a a quite balanced output and quite low harmonics is usually very complex. Hence, such an inverter is usually very expensive and quite large in size. Therefore, an inverter designer should sacrice from one or more of these design goals for the sake of simplicity and cost. Since, making the output of an inverter low distortion increases the cost signicantly and a distorted output does not have severe aects, engineers usually prefer sacricing from low distortion to other design goals. Therefore, most of the commercially available inverters just produce square waves instead of pure sinusoidal waves.

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2.1

Rules
Groups

Projects will be done by groups of two students supervised by the same assistant. Each group will present its own circuit. A circuit may not be shared by two or more groups. Cheating will be severely punished.

2.2

Project Phases

The project will consist of two phases, namely the preparation and implementation phases. Each phase will be concluded by a report. 2.2.1 Preparation

In this phase, each group is required to present a design solution for the project in a formal report (pre-report). This report should also include simulation results illustrating the operation of the circuit used in the design. The deadline for submitting the pre-report is 19th of May. Late submission will receive lower grades. Also note that you will not be allowed to continue next phase unless a pre-report is submitted. Take your time to discuss dierent design ideas and feel free to consult your assistants anytime. 2.2.2 Implementation

In this phase, you will physically construct your design. A successful implementation is possible only through a rigorous test-modify-test cycle. Since you are allotted a limited time for testing your circuits in the laboratory, you should use your time eciently. Notice that, you are supposed to provide your own circuit components (op-amps, resistors, capacitors, pots, etc.) and bread-board. You can consult your assistants about how and where to get them. It is a good practice to construct and test your circuit step-by-step and in isolated sections, as such an approach makes the detection and correction of any mistakes much easier. 2.2.3 Final Report

The nal report should include the nal design, results, a simple cost analysis, and a summary of the experiences gained during the project. The reports should

be properly formatted. The objectives, results and the experiences should be clearly presented. This does not necessarily mean a long report, but denitely a well-organized one. The nal report should contain the following sections: Abstract (a brief summary of the report) Introduction Design formulation Description of circuit operation Computer simulation results Results of your implementation Comments and conclusions

Specications and Allowed Elements

The frequency of the output of your circuit should be 100 Hz 10%. Other minimum required specications of your circuit can be summarized as follows: Voltage amplitude: 7 Vrms . Power delivered to the load: 3 W. Eciency: 25%. You will use the 25 V output of the Agilent E3631 power supply with 12 V setting. You may also use the +6 V power supply with any setting, if necessary. You may use any type of resistors, capacitors, inductors, transformers, diodes, and transistors. You may also use op-amps, however, the only allowed op-amp model is A741 or LM 741.

Extra Features

This project can be enriched with many extra features. Some of the possible extra features can be listed as: Variable frequency, variable amplitude, running an induction motor with your inverter.

Evaluation

The following are the major issues to be considered in the evaluation of your work. The quantitative performance of your circuit,

 the organization, presentation, and the information content of the reports, the originality of your work and the innovative ideas and approaches included, the demonstration performance, the ecient use of components, any extra features and contributions. The most signicant portion of your grade will come from the quantitative performance of your circuit. The quantities to be evaluated are: The power delivered to the load, the eciency, the balance of your inverter. In order to measure these quantities you need a three phase load. You will design and implement the required three phase load that will be used during the evaluations. You are free to choose the component values in the load in order to maximize the quantities to be measured. However, your load should be a resistive and Y-connected load. You will measure the quantities listed above during the demonstration. You can measure the power delivered to the load by the two wattmeter method. You can calculate the power supplied to your inverter easily. Eciency of your inverter is the the total power delivered to the load divided by the power supplied to your inverter. Ideally the voltage at the intersection point of the load should be zero. However, as you will observe, this is not true in practice. The balance of your circuit will be measured as the ratio of the rms value of the voltage at the intersection point of the load to the minimum of the rms values of the line voltages at the inverter output.

Hints

In this section you will be provided some hints. However, you do not have to make use of any of these hints. Firstly, a DC to three-phase inverter with perfectly sinusoidal outputs would require large inductors which are very dicult to obtain. Hence such an inverter is quite dicult to design and quite expensive to implement. The specications of this project can be satised with a square wave output inverter. However, an inverter design with lower distortion will receive higher grade. Secondly, BC238 and BC308 are not capable of satisfying the power requirements of the project. If you try to satisfy the power output specication with these transistors you will denitely burn them. Make a search for other transistors with higher power ratings. Thirdly, the most of the resistors available on the market have a power rating of 1/4 Watts. If you use these resistors in your load and satisfy the minimum power requirement you will denitely burn them. 4

C R + R1 VO1 + VO2 R C

R2

Figure 1: A circuit generating two square waves with phases 90o degrees apart.

Fourthly, avoid usage of inductors as much as possible. If you still need an inductor keep in mind that commercially available inductors have very low power ratings. Hence, it is better to wind your own inductors in this case. Consult your assistant for how to wind an inductor. Fifthly, the load resistors and transistors used in the circuit may become quite hot during the operation of your circuit. Hence, do not connect the probes of the oscilloscope and the multimeter to these components directly, since the probes can melt down. Use a jumper wire between the probes and the components. Moreover, do not touch the hot components. Sixthly, a DC to three phase inverter usually consists of two parts. First part is the low-power signal generation part. This part generates the three waveforms with 120o of phase dierences between each other. There are many dierent ways of implementing this part. The circuit shown in Figure 1 provides a clue for an implementation. This circuit generates two square waves with phases 90o apart. You can modify this circuit to obtain three square waves with phases 120o apart. The second part is the power amplication part. A common-collector or a common-drain amplier can be used as the power amplier. Although these ampliers are very simple and cheap to implement, they are not preferred in commercial application since they have low eciencies. However, you can satisfy the eciency requirement with these ampliers. You can obtain eciencies in the order of 90% with a slightly more complex power amplier than these ampliers. Finally, do not hesitate to consult your assistant during the project work.