UPDATES
05/08/2012...
Bad news is upon us today. Our inverter doesn’t work anymore. However, we have backup plans which we are now taking into action. The final paper, on the other hand, is going well. We need to do some final simulations and wrap it up.
04/26/2012...
Today is the day we present. Our final PowerPoint is online in our deliverables section. The Student Exp went well. Unfortunately we didn't win anything, however we still feel as though our judges were impressed. Final tasks to accomplish are the final term paper preparing for the demonstration for the professors.
04/03/2012...
Today Ali is continuing work on his software side. Basheer and I have built our inverter. The amazing thing is that it works! However, we need to add it into our overall system which we will do Thursday. The picture of our inverter can be seen in the photos section.
03/22/2012...
Today we were able to get our boost converters to work properly. In fact, you can see our results in the photos section. Our next steps are to tweak our interleaved boost converters to generate specific outputs. Dr. Na and Ali, on the other hand, are still hard at work on the current controller.
03/20/2012...
We are returning from spring break with a vengeance. Currently Ali has our voltage controller completely working and he is now hard at work on the current controller. On the hardware side, Basheer and I are finishing up finals tests with our boost converters to make sure they are completely working. My main job this week is to allow Basheer and Ali to continue their work while I get us ready for the Student Expo.
02/23/2012...
This week is definitely a crunch week. We have our progress report on Tuesday the 21st. So this week’s lab is dedicated to catering the progress report’s needs, which means we spent a majority of our time recording and taking in data. The data recording was done on mainly on the hardware side of the project. Basheer and I gathered data from different elements of our design. These elements include the generator, 3 phase rectifier and boost converter. Ali, on the other hand, is in the process of completing the voltage controller. This voltage controller will set the duty cycle to meet the boost converter’s output.
02/16/2012...
This week was a big week for us. Basheer and I had a lot of success on the hardware side. We were able to create two WORKING boost converters. We also fixed our gate driver problems. The fix that we did was crucial because Ali depended on our part in order to get started on his. So this week was an exciting week because all group members are hard at work on our parts slowly but still getting closer to our original goals.
02/02/2012...
As of today we are the in the middle of the design process on both sides, the hardware and software. As far as software goes, Ali is using today to design of the PI controller. This semester already he has designed the voltage and current sensors and interfacing circuit. His next plan of action after his inevitable completion of the PI controller is to work on the MPPT (Maximum Power Point Tracking).
Basheer and I, on the other hand, are hard at work at implementing and troubleshooting our boost converter circuitry. We need a gate driver in order to drive the boost converter to 15V which will switch our IGBT. So far, we have verified that the 3 phase rectifier works and meet specification. Waveforms from the 3 phase rectifier can be viewed via our website on the deliverables page under the link called 3 phase rectifier waveforms. In addition to the 3 phase rectifier, we have also assembled a power supply that converts 120 AC to 14V DC. Waveforms of our power supply can be viewed via website on the deliverables page under the link called power supply waveforms. Our next course of action is to interleaved two boost converters and verify operation and meeting specs.
.10/20/2011...
We just finished our product list to be sent off to Matus. Currently, we are performing the finishing touches to our PSim model and would like to have accurate values by the end of the semester.
10/27/2011...
Basheer and I are now constructing a boost converter while Ali and Jerred continue working on installing all PSim applications and understanding the software more in depth.
12/06/2011...
As we end our first semester, here is a couple links to some of the results we were able to generate.