Indirect Field Oriented Control of Induction Motors using Adaptive Differential Evolution Technique

Recently, many advanced variable-frequency drives have been developed to make control of three-phase induction motors simple and effective, one of them is Indirect-Field Oriented Control (IFOC) control. Usually in IFOC, PI controllers are used to regulate and control currents and torque. Conventional PI controller’s tuning is a common problem as trial-and-error approach may not always be effective in managing the complicated dynamics of the induction motor as it takes considerable knowledge of the system dynamics and effort in tuning. In this paper, PI gains tuning is performed using a relatively new variation of the meta-heuristic technique, Differential Evolution (DE). The adopted DE, named “meanDE”, aims to minimize the Integral-Time Absolute Error (ITAE) calculated from the errors of the three PI controllers by finding optimal PI gains. Space-Vector Modulation (SVM) is used as a PWM generator to control the voltage-source inverter. The simulation results are compared with the traditional trial-and-error tuning to show that the meanDE is robust, simple, and yields superior results under variable operating conditions.