Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Degree

Master of Engineering Science

Program

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Supervisor

Dr Lyndon J. Brown

Abstract

The resistance measurement in the resistance spot welding (RSW), is an ongoing research topic. The high current flow during the welding process induces an electromagnetic field in the wires which are attached to the electrodes to measure tip voltage. This results an additional voltage drop which is proportional to the derivative of current. Also the presence of silicon controlled rectifier (SCR) in the welding power supply generates harmonics in both supply voltage and current. These issues together complicate the methods for resistance estimation.

A set of simultaneous linear equations is derived for the on-line measurement of dynamic resistance and induced voltage constant by using the dynamic circuit analysis of weld setup. This can be solved to determine the weld resistance using instantaneous phasors measurements for the 1st, 3rd and 5th harmonics of current and measured voltage signals. The instantaneous phasor measurements for these desired harmonics are obtained by employing the following proposed method.

In this thesis, a new method for the measurement of instantaneous phasor is proposed for the narrow band signals. The proposed algorithm is based on the internal model principle (IMP) defined for the cancellation of a sinusoidal disturbance signal. The IMP has two states, exhibiting the properties of being sinusoidal and orthogonal. The instantaneous values of IMP states are defined as real and imaginary components of a complex signal at each time instant. The instantaneous measurements of envelope and phase of a sinusoidal signal are determined from instantaneous values of complex signal by using arithmetic properties of complex numbers. In case of signal comprising of sum of sinusoids of different frequencies, the approach for obtaining instantaneous phasor for each sinusoidal component is presented by connecting multiple internal models in the parallel and open-loop configuration.

The instantaneous phasor measurement of fundamental frequency signal is not only advantageous in detecting faults like short circuiting, harmonic distortion and frequency variations but it can also be applied to protect power system from these faults. In this work, the applicability of the proposed instantaneous phasor measurement algorithm is analyzed for scenarios of power disturbances due to the the harmonic distortion and decaying DC offset. The results are discussed and compared with few existing methods.

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