General modeling of saturated AC machines for industrial drives

Purpose – When magnetic saturation in ac machines is evolved, the theory of main flux saturation in d-q axes remains the best. Because of its simplicity, it is the most used in either motoring or generating mode for synchronous or asynchronous machines. Although, it is considered as a global way of introducing the iron saturation, compared to other methods, today, its fidelity has no contest in predicting complex ac machine operations. For this purpose, the aims of this paper consists of modeling these machines whatever the state-space variables values are taking into account the magnetic saturation. Two unified procedures are proposed. The first one deals with a common approach to establishing a complete and detailed model synthesis in d-q axes. The second also presents a unified approach to introducing magnetic saturation of the iron core in the characteristic equations. The analysis takes the salient pole synchronous machine as a general case of study. Then the approaches are extended to undamped and smooth air gap synchronous machines as well as induction machines. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – The present paper, which is a first part of a work under study dealing with a unified method to derive multiple models of saturated ac machines, is intended to the description of an alternative method and its application for induction and synchronous machines. It mainly consists of the following parts: first, after writing the stator and rotor space vector d-q equations, the number of possible models is immediately discussed. By considering the currents and fluxes as state-space variables, 14 models are obtained for AC induction machine (IM and SM). They are classified into three families, current (three), flux (three) and mixed models (eight). Second, in order to easily introduce the magnetic saturation in the 14 developed models, a method is presented. It consists of just elaborating the model with the winding currents as state variables, then deriving all the other models from it. Third, to emphasize the influence of the presence of magnetic saturation, in each model, each inductance along the d and q axes is written with a fundamental expression which exists with or without saturation and an additional one due purely to saturation. Hence the additional terms can be studied and quantified in an easy way or simply removed when linear case is assumed. Fourth, adopting such strategy to write the different coefficients of t