Comparison of Starting Current Characteristics for Three-Phase Induction Motor Due to Phase-control Soft Starter and Asynchronous PWM AC Chopper

This paper presents the comparison of starting current characteristics of a three-phase induction motor fed by two types of soft starters. The first soft starter under investigation is a conventional AC voltage controller on the basis of a phase-control technique. The other is the proposed asynchronous PWM AC chopper which is developed from the conventional synchronous PWM AC chopper. In this paper, the proposed asynchronous PWM AC chopper control scheme is developed by generating only two asynchronous PWM signals for a three-phase main power circuit (6 switching devices) from a single voltage control signal which is compared with a single sawtooth carrier signal. By this approach, the PWM signals are independent and easy to implement since the PWM signals do not need to be synchronized with a three-phase voltage source. Details of both soft starters are discussed. The experimental and simulation results of the starting currents are shown. It is found that the asynchronous PWM AC chopper efficiently works as a suitable soft starter for the three-phase induction motor due to that the starting currents are reduced and are sinusoidal with less harmonic contents, when being compared with the starting current waveforms using the conventional phase-control starting technique. Also the proposed soft starter offers low starting electromagnetic torque pulsation.