Integrated monitoring and Control of Cycloconverter Drive System for Fault Diagnosis and Predictive Maintenance

Mining power systems have a unique industrial environment: low short-circuit levels, high-power non-linear equipments, transient over-voltages, high altitude locations, dust, vibrations, etc., where faults easily occur affecting the integrity of the electronics equiment and drives reducing reliability with undesirable effects on safety and production. In order to reduce the occurrence of failures, most power installations have protection systems intended for reliable and selective clearence of faults, but their protection signals are usually not integrated to the Distributed Control System (DCS). With advances of information technologies, it becomes more practical to create more powerful signal processing systems for a predictive monitoring function implementation. Predictive maintenance capability can reduce the costs associated with downtimes, as well as to avoid safety hazards associated with unexpected and catastrophic failures. This paper is mainly focused on the study and implementation of a laboratory scale prototype and monitoring system for a cycloconverter with a real-time model for observation of internal variables that works integrated with the DCS control. The main contribution of this system, over the conventional monitoring and diagnosis systems is the reduction of required measurements and the use of control variables for improving performance and robust system surveillance.