Active and Reactive Power Control of the Rotor Loads in a Five-Phase Wound Rotor Induction Motor Drive

The automated box-fill systems are commonly based on rotary assembly platforms. In these automation applications, it is necessary to solve the problem of the power transfer to the auxiliary actuators mounted on the rotating platform. The use of slip rings is the simplest solution, but the damage of the contact surface can cause several faults, such as spark discharge and local overheating. Therefore, some alternatives have been investigated. In this paper, this problem is solved by adopting a direct drive wound-rotor five-phase machine that can independently control the rotor torque and the power flow delivered to the rotor loads. A theoretical analysis is presented to optimize the system performance by controlling the rotor reactive power. Experimental results are shown to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.