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Basic Electronics Control DC Circuits

EE-Tools, Instruments, Devices, Components & Measurements Motors Protection

DC Drives – Construction,
Working & Classification of
Electrical DC Drives
Electrical Technology 6  9 minutes read

What are DC Drives? Working & Operation of DC

Drives

Table of Contents [Hide]

 1 What are DC Drives?
2 Components of a DC Drive?
3 Working Principle of DC Drives
4 Digital and Analog DC Drives
5 Analog DC Drives
6 Digital DC Drives
7 What’s inside of Power Conversion make SCR DC Drives?

DC drive technology is efficient, reliable, cost effective, operator

friendly and relatively easy to implement. DC drive provides many
advantages over AC drives, especially for regenerative and high
power applications. DC drives have been widely used in industrial
drive applications in order to offer very precise control.

• Also read:

 What are Electrical Drives? Working & Operation of AC Drives

Of course, variable frequency drives (VFDs) and AC motors are

now offering an alternative to DC drives and motors, but there are
many other applications where DC drives are extensively used
including crane and hoists, elevators, spindle drives, winders,
paper production machines, crushers, etc. due to the advantages
of DC drives.
What are DC Drives?
DC drive is basically a DC motor speed control system that
supplies the voltage to the motor to operate at desired speed.
Earlier, the variable DC voltage for the speed control of an
industrial DC motor was generated by a DC generator.

By using an induction motor, the DC generator was driven at a

fixed speed and by varying the field of the generator, variable
voltage was generated. Soon after this Ward Leonard set was
replaced by a mercury arc rectifier and later by thyristor
converters. Nowadays, the thyristor family of devices is used
widely to control the speed of the DC motor.

Components of a DC Drive?
The main components of a DC drive system are shown in figure
below.

DC Drive Input: Some thyristor based DC drives operate on a

single phase supply and use four thyristors for full wave
rectification. For larger motors, three phase power supply is
needed because the waveforms are much smoother. In such
cases, six thyristors are needed for full wave rectification.

Rectifier Bridge: The power component of a controlled DC drive

is a full wave bridge rectifier which can be driven by three phase
or single phase supply. As mentioned above the number of
thyristor may vary depends on the supply voltage.

A six-thyristor bridge (in case of three phase converter) rectifies

the incoming AC supply to DC supply to the motor armature. The
firing angle control of these thyristors varies the voltage to the
motor.

Field Supply Unit: The power to be applied to the field winding is

much lower than the armature power, so, most often single phase
supply is provided. A separate thyristor bridge or diode rectifier is
used for supplying the power to the field winding of the motor.

In many cases a two-phase supply is drawn from the three phase

input (that supplies power to the armature) and hence the field
exciter is included in the armature supply unit.

The function of the field supply unit is to provide a constant

voltage to the field winding to create a constant field or flux in the
motor. In some cases, this unit is supplied with thyristors to reduce
the voltage applied to the field so as to control the speed of the
motor above the base speed.

In case of permanent magnet DC motors, the field supply unit is

not included in the drive.

Speed Regulation unit: It compares the operator instruction

(desired speed) with feedback signals and sends appropriate
signals to the firing circuit. In analog drives, this regulator unit
consists of both voltage and current regulators. The voltage
regulator accepts the speed error as input and produces the
voltage output which is then applied to the current regulator.

The current regulator then produces required firing current to the

firing circuit. If more speed is required, additional current is called
from the voltage regulator and hence thyristors conducts for more
periods. Generally, this regulation (both voltage and current) is
accomplished with proportional-integral-derivative controllers.

The field current regulator is also provided where speed greater

than the base speed is required.

In modern digital microprocessor based drives, the speed control

is achieved with a lookup table to determine the current for the
firing circuit with additional digital circuitry.

Firing Circuit: It supplies the gate pulses to thyristors so that they

turned ON for particular periods to produce variable armature
voltage. Isolation is also provided in this gate drive circuit.

Working Principle of DC Drives

In DC motors, the speed is proportional to the armature voltage
and inversely proportional to the field current. And also, the
armature current is proportional to the motor torque. Therefore, by
increasing or reducing the applied voltage, the speed of the motor
is varied. However, it is possible up to the rated voltage. If the
speed greater than the base speed is required, the field current of
the motor has to be reduced.
By reducing the field current, the flux in the motor reduces. The
reduction of field current reduces the armature counter emf. The
more armature current flows if there is less counter armature emf.
Further, this armature current increases the motor torque and
hence the speed. These are the two basic principles employed in
DC drives to control the speed of the motor.

In armature controlled DC drives, drive unit provides a rated

current and torque at any speed between zero and the base of the
motor. By varying the armature voltage, variable speed is obtained
as shown in figure.

Generally, a fixed field supply is provided in these DC drives. As

the torque is constant (which describes a load type) over the
speed range, the motor output horsepower is proportional to the
speed (HP = T × N / 525). The motor characteristics of this drive
are shown below.
In case of armature and field controlled drives, the armature
voltage to the motor is controlled for constant torque-variable HP
operation up to the base speed of the motor. And for the above
base speed operation, drive switches to the field control for
constant HP- reduced torque operation up to maximum speed as
shown in figure below. In this case, reducing the field current
increases the speed of the motor up to its maximum speed as
shown in figure.

Digital and Analog DC Drives

Nowadays, digital implementations have replaced analog circuitry

of electric drive system in all forms of industrial control. Digital
controllers offer greater flexibility to produce the precise control,
self-tuning, and ease of interfacing with host computers and other
drives. However, a basic understanding of analogue version DC
drive makes less difficult to understand its digital equivalent. Let
us look on both of these DC drives.

Analog DC Drives
A standard analog DC drive with speed and current control is
shown in figure below. The objective of this system is to provide
speed control and hence the speed reference becomes the input
to the system and speed of the motor is the output of the system
which is measured by the tachometer.

The working of this drive goes like this; consider that motor is
running at a set speed. Now, the speed reference signal has
increased to somewhat greater than the actual speed. So there
will be an error speed signal at left-hand summing junction as
shown in figure. This speed error indicates the required
acceleration by the motor, which means the torque and hence
more current.

The error is amplified by the speed controller (which is basically a

speed-error amplifier) and its output is given as current input
reference to the inner control system. As the current reference
increases, the inner current controller drives the more current to
the motor thereby extra torque is provided.
The inner current loop is responsible for maintaining the zero
current error between the actual motor current and current
reference signal which means to make actual motor current to
follow the reference current. The amplified current error signal
from the current controller controls the firing angle of the bridge
and hence the output voltage of the converter. The current
feedback is achieved either by DC transformer or by AC
transformer (with rectifier) in the main supply lines.

This entire operation is performed by a current error amplifier with

a high gain. In most cases, this amplifier is of proportional plus
integral control (PI) type circuit that maintains the actual and
desired currents exactly equal under steady-state conditions. This
current controller also limits the current through the motor by
considering the minimum and maximum currents of the motor.

The outer loop provides the speed control by comparing the actual
speed obtained by the DC tachogenerator with desired or required
speed from the speed reference. These two inputs are fed into the
speed-error amplifier, and then resulted error is amplified and
applied as an input to the current controller.

The speed amplifier produces the current output proportion to the

speed error. For this amplifier also a PI control is employed (by
using analog electronics) in order to achieve zero steady state
error. Using this, the actual speed of the motor is maintained
exactly at reference speed for all loads.

Digital DC Drives
With the advancements in digital control, DC drives become more
flexible and faster (due to faster response times) compared with
analog drives. A schematic arrangement of digital DC drive is
shown in below figure; of course it is similar to the analog scheme,
but here analog circuit (analog amplifiers) is replaced by digital
circuitry.

A speed reference signal given as the drive’s input compared with

the feedback speed in the summing circuit. If the output of the
summing circuit is positive error, indicating that a speed increase
is required and if it generates a negative error, indicating that a
speed decrease is required (because motor is operating at faster
than desired speed).

The error speed is given to the speed controller in the

microprocessor which determines output voltage to operate the
motor at desired speed. At the same time, current controller in the
microprocessor determines the firing signals to the SCRs in the
bridge converter. SCRs then convert the three phase supply to DC
supply in relation to the desired speed.

This drive can operate in open loop without any feedback and can
achieve a speed regulation of 5-8%. However, a speed regulation
less than 5% is required in many applications. In such cases, the
speed measuring/scaling unit switches to the EMF feedback
measuring circuit.

This feedback circuit measures the armature voltage, scales it in

proportion to the output voltage (scaling function in
microprocessor) and gives to the summing circuit. Further, it is
transformed into a speed error signal in speed controller.

If the speed regulation less than 1% is required, tachometer

generator feedback is used. So the speed measuring/scaling
circuit then switches to the tachometer feedback. This feedback
achieves very precise control compared with EMF feedback.

Also for field control (above rated speeds), this drive includes a
separate field exciter. A field current regulator in the
microprocessor determines the voltage to the field windings by
accepting the flux/field reference signal from the operator. This
regulator provides the firing signals required by the field converter
unit to produce the required DC voltage proportional to the speed.

What’s inside of Power Conversion make SCR DC

Drives?
Silicon Controlled Rectifiers (SCRs) are widely used thyristors for
large DC motor drives in its power conversion unit. An SCR
conducts when a small voltage applied to its gate terminal. Its
conduction continues till the starting of negative cycle and it turned
OFF automatically once the voltage across the SCR goes through
natural zero till next gated signal.

The purpose of using these SCRs in DC drives is to convert the

fixed AC supply to variable DC supply that controls the motor
speed.

As discussed earlier, some SCR DC drives are supplied from

single phase AC supply and use four SCRs in the form of bridge
for the DC rectification. In case of high power DC drives, a three
phase supply with six SCRs is used for DC rectification.

In case four quadrant operation (forward motoring, forward

braking, reverse motoring and reverse braking) of the DC drive, a
bridge rectifier of consisting of 12 SCRs with a three phase
incoming supply is used. During each quadrant operation, SCRs
are triggered at a phase angle in order to provide required DC
voltage to the motor.

The connection of SCRs (for four quadrant operation of the drive)

from incoming three phase AC supply to the DC output is shown in
figure below. In this, the motoring SCR bridge and regeneration
SCR bridge achieve the drive four quadrant operation by receiving
the appropriate gate signals from (analog or digital) controller.

If the SCRs were gated with a phase angle of zero degrees, then
the drive function as a rectifier which feds the full rectified rated
DC supply to the motor and by varying the firing angle to the
SCRs, a variable DC supply is applied to the motor.

The DC output voltage waveform in relation to the AC waveform

for above circuit is shown below. This average DC output voltage
is obtained for 400, 320 and 240 firing phase angles. By this way,
the average output is controlled by varying the firing phase angles
to the SCRs.
As the field winding also requires the regulated DC supply, only
four SCRs are used in the field bridge converter. This is because
field never requires a negative current and hence another set of
SCRs is not required, which were used in armature for reversing
the motor.

In modern DC drives, SCRs are completely replaced by

MOSFETs and IGBTs in order to achieve high speed switching so
that distortion to the AC incoming power and currents during
switching is eliminated. Hence, the drive becomes more efficient
and accurate.

As discussed in AC drives article, DC drives are also available in

modular units that consisting analog and digital I/Os,
multifunctional keypads, remote operator panels in addition to the
software programming and configuring capabilities, from various
manufacturers such as ABB, Siemens, Rockwell automation,
Emerson, etc. These can be connected to the other drives or a
computer host via communication cables.
Programming macros of these drives enables to implement any
control structure to an application. These are also capable of
receiving the remote control signals from remote programmable
logic controllers via field bus communication systems.

 Tags AC Drives DC Drives Digital & Analog DC Drives Electrical Drives

Motor Control Speed Control

6 Comments
Carlos Arturo Pérez Parodi
GRACIAS POR DEJARME,SABER DE USTEDES..ESTOY MUY CONTENTO
DE HABERLOS ENCONTRADO..FELICITARLOS POR SU MUY COMPLETA Y
MAGNIFICA PAGINA…MUY BUEN ESFUERZO EL DE TODOS
USTEDES…..LOS SEGUIRE SIEMPRE…..GRACIAS OTRA VEZ,DESDE
COLOMBIA…..

Reply

Ramchandra Kulkarni
I like this but ,I want practically wiring of all meters & control wiring .

Reply

Graham Johnson
What happens when the shunt field of a compound wound motor is left on whilst
not running, will this cause the shunt fields to burn

Reply

Doan Truong
Thank for you this article, very insightful overview!

Reply
Carlos Arturo Pérez Parodi
Hello, good evening, from Colombia
Could you please help me with the Electronic Diagrams, the Drivers, for the
variators of speed, of CCY where I could get all their parts? Thank you very much,
greetings from Colombia, do not know how much I appreciate and value, all this
knowledge, what we share

Reply

Manjula
can i know the advantages and disadvantsages of DC motor drive and AC motor
drive

Reply