A switching control strategy based on output regulation subspaces for the control of induction motors using a three-level inverter

In this work we present the design of a new switching control strategy for a three-level converter aimed to improve the performance of a direct torque control (DTC) for induction machines, special attention is given to the reduction of torque ripple. As in classical DTC, the proposed technique is aimed to directly regulate the outputs: torque and flux amplitude. We show that, classical DTC can be considered as a particular case of the proposed control strategy. The proposed criterion to design the switching control sequence is based on a quadratic criterion of the output errors plus a prediction in one-step ahead, and an interesting partition of the input state space generated by the output regulation subspaces (ORS) to facilitate the selection of the control vector for reducing the computational load. As a result a control vector is selected without the requirement of an auxiliary space vector or any other modulation technique. Simulations results using the proposed control technique confirm the validity of this approach.