The Small Hydro Power Plants allow to increase the energy amount from renewable sources, especially from small rivers in mountainous areas. This paper presents a new concept of a energy conversion system for application in a Small Hydropower Plant (SHP) which is based on a permanent magnet generator (PM generator) with a propeller turbine integrated with the generator rotor. The PM generator can work at a variable speed and therefore energy produced by the PM generator has to be converted by means of a power electronic unit to fit to the three-phase power grid parameters. For this concept, dimensions and parameters of the PM generator were specially designed on account of integration with water turbine. The paper precisely describes elements of energy conversion system and also presents the results of numerical tests for chosen working conditions. An original algorithm of control strategy for power electronic unit was used to adjust generated energy to the required parameters of the three-phase grid.

A lot of methods for sensorless drive control have been published last years for synchronous and asynchronous machines. One of the approaches uses high frequency carrier injection for position control. The injected high frequency signal is controlled to remain in alignment with the saliency produced by the saturation of the main flux. Due to the fact that it does not use the fundamental machine model which fails at standstill of the magnetic field it is possible to control the drive even at zero speed. In spite of this obvious advantage industry does not apply sensorless control in their products. This is due to the dependency of many published methods on physical parameters of the machine. The high frequency carrier injection method, presented in this paper, does not need to have exact machine parameters and it can be used for machines where there is only a very small rotor anisotropy like in Surface Mounted Permanent Magnet Synchronous Machines (SMPMSM) [1]. Standard drives usually are supplied by a 6-pulse diode rectifier. Due to new European directives concerning the harmonic content in the mains it is expected that the use of controlled pulse-width modulated PWM rectifiers will be enforced in the future [2]. An important advantage of this type of rectifiers is the regeneration of the energy back to the grid. Another benefit are low harmonics in comparison to diode rectifiers. Using one of many control methods published so far it is also possible to achieve almost unity power factor. However, in these methods voltage sensors are necessary to synchronize PWM rectifiers with the mains. Therefore they are not very popular in the industry with respect to the cost and the lack of reliability. Recently a control method was proposed which is based on a tracking scheme. It does not need any voltage sensor on the ac-side of the rectifier and it does not need to know accurate parameters of the system. This paper presents the control solution for a cheap, industry friendly (no additional hardware and installation effort) drive system. The phase tracking method for control of electrical drive and PWM rectifier is described. Encouraging experimental results are shown.

The paper presents a concept of a control system for a high-frequency three-phase PWM grid-tied converter (3x400 V / 50 Hz) that performs functions of a 10-kW DC power supply with voltage range of 600÷800 V and of a reactive power compensator. Simulation tests (in PLECS) allowed proper selection of semiconductor switches between fast IGBTs and silicon carbide MOSFETs. As the main criterion minimum amount of power losses in semiconductor devices was adopted. Switching frequency of at least 40 kHz was used with the aim of minimizing size of passive filters (chokes, capacitors) both on the AC side and on the DC side. Simulation results have been confirmed in experimental studies of the PWM converter, the power factor of which (inductive and capacitive) could be regulated in range from 0.7 to 1.0 with THDi of line currents below 5% and energy efficiency of approximately 98.5%. The control system was implemented in Texas Instruments TMS320F28377S microcontroller.