Exploitation of the Power Capability in a Five-Phase Doubly-Fed Induction Motor Drive for Contact-Less Energy Transfer

Rotary assembly stations are commonly used in automated manufacturing processes. These production platforms require the speed control of the plate and need power for the actuators and sensors located on the rotating frame. These requirements are usually met through a gearmotor and sliding electrical contacts. Among the solutions that avoid the slip-rings, this paper focuses on an integrated electric drive consisting of a gearless five-phase wound-rotor induction machine fed by two inverters, one placed on the stator reference frame and one placed on the rotating one. The main contribution is a novel control scheme that maximizes the power transferred to the rotating loads in compliance with the thermal constraint of the rotor and the voltage constraint of the rotor inverter. The theoretical analysis allows deriving an analytical solution to the control problem, and the experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.