Synthetic Loading for Symmetrical and Asymmetrical Six-Phase Machines

Recently, multiple three-phase machines are becoming progressively adopted in high power applications. This is due to their high reliability and fault-tolerance capabilities. A substantial amount of research and development is carried out to design and test these machines. One of the necessary tests is the full-load test, where the machine's thermal design is verified. Normally, this test requires another machine, with the same power rating or higher, to be mechanically coupled to the tested machine, while the converters are connected in the back-to-back configuration. This paper introduces a novel technique of implementing the regenerative test for six-phase induction machines with symmetrical or asymmetrical winding configuration. The proposed approach is capable of validating the thermal design of the machine without the need for coupling another machine as a load. The scheme utilises indirect rotor-field oriented control (IRFOC) to achieve the full-load test. The rated active power is flowing in closed loop from one winding set to another. The only power used during the test is to cover the losses in the machine and the converter. The proposed control scheme is novel since it utilises the y-component from the vector space decomposition (VSD) subspace, instead of implementing the multiple vector control (multi-stator, MS) approach for each winding sets. The proposed scheme is validated through the simulation results.