A Novel Two-phase Soft Starter Used for Three-phase Asynchronous Motors

Background: Traditional thyristor-based three-phase soft starters of induction motor often suffer from high starting current and heavy harmonics. Moreover, both the trigger pulse generation and driving circuit design are usually complicated. Methods: To address these issues, we propose a novel soft starter structure using fully controlled IGBTs in this paper. Compared to approaches of traditional design, this structure only uses twophase as the input, and each phase is controlled by a power module that is composed of one IGBT and four diodes. Results: Consequently, both driving circuit and control design are greatly simplified due to the requirement of fewer controlled power semiconductor switches, which leads to the reduction of the total cost. Conclusion: Both Matlab/Simulink simulation results and experimental results on a prototype demonstrate that the proposed soft starter can achieve better performances than traditional thyristorbased soft starters for Starting Current (RMS) and harmonics.