High Performance Control of Power Converters in Mining Applications

Various modern control concepts have been developed over the last decades. Despite that, due to real-time computational constraints, standard linear controllers continue to dominate in industry applications of power converters. On the other hand, demanding applications (for example, mining excavating machines) can benefit from advanced performance offered by modern control schemes. To this aim, the current paper develops advanced control structures using principles of Optimal control, Predictive control and Kalman observers. To ensure their easy implementation with industrial variable speed drives (VSD), the paper expresses the proposed novel structures in the form similar to the standard (PI or PR) control. The paper then demonstrated the advantages of the proposed advanced control schemes by simulation and experiment.