With more industrial, transportation, and defense applications utilizing electric motor drives, operating a group of such drives to achieve a certain goal has become more common. Multiple drives or multi-drives open a new dimension of research into optimizing their combined performance metrics through energy savings, cost savings, increased reliability, and enhanced performance. Therefore, a hierarchy of controls is essential to coordinate among these drives to maximize these metrics. The project's technical success will be partially assessed through an industrial advisory board, which will be formed to ensure quick transitioning of the proposed research into products in areas of national need. The project also aims at establishing new courses, upgrading existing courses, and participating in curricular undergraduate and graduate activities, to promote electric drives and related application areas of national interest. Under-represented minority students will be recruited to participate in research, educational and outreach activities through existing and new initiatives at the University of Connecticut. A new K-12 outreach program will be established with low-income high-minority-population high schools in the State of Connecticut, with focus on solar powered motor drives.
This project will establish foundations for control, fault diagnosis, fault mitigation, and coordination between multiple motor drives, i.e. multi-drives. It will mainly utilize supervisory and switching control concepts at the local and global drive levels. The research objective at the local drive level is to achieve highly reliable operation by switching between controllers or reconfiguring the drive based on available feedback, sensor signals, and health information. Therefore, different faults in these drives will be diagnosed and mitigated with single algorithms, and techniques to reconfigure and thus extend the lives of these drives will be proposed. These algorithms will also focus on minimizing the dwell time during which a drive remains in failure mode. At the multi-drive global system level, coordination and optimization will address how roles and priorities are shared among these drives to minimize their energy consumption. This will be achieved through discrete-time supervisory control and energy optimization. Results from this research will be integrated in two graduate motor drives courses as well as a graduate certificate course, and in undergraduate senior design projects and a new course. A trained workforce from technicians to graduate students is expected to result from K-12 through graduate educational and outreach programs, especially a new K-12 program with focus on under-represented minority and low-income students who may start a career path in STEM. Publications, theses and dissertations, technical workshops, and seminars will be integral in disseminating this research at local, national, and international levels.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
