Aravinda Perera
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Aravinda Perera was born in 1984 in Colombo, Sri Lanka. He obtained the B.Sc. Engineering (Honours) Degree from the University of Moratuwa and M.Sc. Engineering Degree from Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in 2009 and 2012 respectively, both in electrical engineering.
Presently, he is reading a Ph.D. degree in NTNU in the field of power electronics. Prior to that, Aravinda has worked in the industry for nearly 10 years. From 2012 to 2018 he was employed by Siemens AS, Norway where he was involved in several R&D projects related to marine and subsea applications.
Aravinda has authored several patents and international conference articles. His research interests include wide-band-gap devices, electric drives, control, and estimation methods, and embedded control implementation methods.
Ph.D. Research
Information
Short Summary of Research
Click here for the long summary of the research and search my name in the pdf.
Background and Motivation
Extraction of seabed minerals is steadily becoming indispensable due to the exponential demand growth, geopolitics and the depletion of easily accessible terrestrial mineral reserves. The state-of-the-art seafloor mineral mining machines are high power, multi-motor remotely operated vehicles (ROV) as in Fig. 1. These ROVs are equipped with multiple submersible variable speed drives (VSD) for various purposes as such as dredging, pumping and track drive. To achieve commercially viable and environmentally friendly mining on the seabed, reliable and efficient and highly power-dense electric drives are required.
Research Directions & Validation
6-phase electric machines with two isolated star-points offer increased hardware redundancy and several other performance improvements compared to the 3-phase counterparts. Interior permanent magnet synchronous machines (IPMSM) inherently offer superior efficiency, high torque density and controllability across a wide speed-range. The stall-torque and highly fluctuating load dynamics are some of the demanding characteristics the seabed drives are exposed to. Under this context, the research goals are set as below and both 3-phase and 6-phase IPMSM drives are investigated.
The algorithms are first offline-simulated in the Matlab/Simulink environment [1],[2],[3],[4] and then programmed using C++ in the Xilinx Zynq System-on-Chip (SoC) based PicoZed industrial embedded control platform. The first stage of the validation is performed using the Embedded Real-Time Simulator (ERTS) [5],[6] (see Fig. 2) programmed in the FPGA section of the SoC. Subsequently, they are validated in the laboratory machine setup. Fig. 4 illustrates the concepts when validated using above three methods.
Proof of Concept
The developed concepts are applicable beyond seabed mineral mining, that demands high operational safety.
