Improving of operation stability of frequency converters with active rectifiers in electric steel-making complex electrical equipment switching

Frequency converters with active rectifiers (FC-AR) are now used in rolling mill electric drives. Modern control systems of ARs are not adapted to voltage sags in power supply systems, which leads to converter tripping. The known methods of ensuring AR operation stability, such as kinetic buffering, correction signals based on negative sequence voltage and others, do not eliminate these emergency trips. As an additional measure the paper proposes the method of voltage sag compensation by using static var compensators (SVC) of electric arc furnaces (EAF) for parallel operation of frequency converters with active rectifiers and electric arc furnaces. However, it remains unknown how disturbances (such as overvoltages of switching of SVC harmonic filters (HF) and voltage sags during furnace transformer switching) affect operation stability of frequency converters with active rectifiers. All this makes it necessary to study the effect of these processes on the operation conditions of FC-AR and to improve the active rectifier control system. The authors used experimental arrays of instantaneous values of voltages and currents of the real-life complex «EAF-SVC» («Electric Arc Furnace – Statistic VAR Compensator») in this study. They also applied mathematical models of FC-AR with different PWM algorithms realized in Matlab-Simulink software. The main assumption of the model consists in using equivalent current sources modelling the operation of autonomous voltage invertors. An improved control system of AR has been developed. The main feature that distinguishes it from the known systems is the fact that it ensures operation stability during SVC harmonic filter and EAF transformer switching by using a signal conditioning unit for setting the active rectifier reactive current component as a function of power supply and AR input voltage difference. Implementation of the improved AR control system improves FC-AR stability during parallel operation with EAFs through reactive power consumption of the supply system. As a result, it reduces the amplitude of inrush current and voltage deviations in the DC-link of the FC-AR to the values lower than the setpoints of the AR protection system.