PhaseOrientation

Orientation of phases

    PhaseOrientation

Library

Electrical/MultiPhase/UsersGuide

Description

In multiphase systems, the angular displacement of voltages and currents of the phases as well as the spatial displacement of machine windings have to follow the same rules, i.e., they are based on the same orientation function.

Symmetrical three phase system

A symmetrical three phases system consists of three sinusoidal sine waves with an angular displacement of 2 π / 3.

Symmetrical multi phase system

In symmetrical multi phase systems odd and even phase numbers have to be distinguished.

Odd number of phases

For a symmetrical multi phase system with m phases the displacement of the sine waves is 2 π / m.

Fig. 1: Symmetrical (a) three phase and (b) five phase current system
phase35.png
Even number of phases

In case of an even number of phases the aligned orientation does not add any information. Instead the m phases are divided into two or more different groups (the base systems).

The number of phases m can be divided by 2 recursively until the result is either an odd number or 2. The result of this division is called mBase, the number of phases of the base system. The number of base systems nBase is defined by the number of divisions, i.e., m = nBase * mBase.

For a base system with mBase phases the displacement of the sine waves belonging to that base system is 2 π / mBase.

Fig. 2: Symmetrical (a) six and (b) ten phase current system
phase610.png

The displacement of the base systems is defined as π / nBase.

Note

In array or matrices, the base systems are stored one after another.

Symmetrical components

For each base system of time phasors, symmetrical components can be calculated according to the idea of Charles L. Fortescue.

The first symmetrical component is the direct component with positive sequence.
In case of mBase = 2, the second component is the inverse component with negative sequence.
In case of mBase > 2, the components [2..mBase - 1] are components with non-positive sequence,
and the last component [mBase] is the zero sequence component.

This set of symmetrical components is repeated for each of the nBase base systems.

See also

User's guide on multi phase winding.