Investigations on LVAC architectures of diesel electric propulsion based marine vessels for improved power quality and reliability

This paper presents the investigation on two low voltage AC (LVAC) architectures of the diesel-electric propulsion system for marine vessels. It focuses on the power quality and reliability of two LVAC architectures employing: (1) conventional 12-pulse converter and (2) 6-pulse converter with harmonic compensation. A current controlled voltage source inverter has been used as a shunt active filter to compensate the current harmonics present in the system. Two control systems based on the synchronous rotating frame theory and proportional resonant control are proposed for the control of the shunt active filter. MATLAB Simulink simulations of the shunt active filter in the diesel-electric propulsion system with two diesel generators feeding two thruster loads and hotel load has been done and the obtained results are furnished. The reliability evaluation of both the architectures has been performed to confirm the viability of the proposed architecture.