División de Ingeniería Mecatrónica, Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Huixquilucan, Tecnológico Nacional de México, Estado de México, Mexico
This paper presents the design of a smooth starter for a DC motor that uses a full-bridge Buck inverter powered by renewable energy. For this aim, a renewable energy power supply is considered in the mathematical model of the “full-bridge Buck inverter–DC motor” system. Whereas, for the design of the smooth starter, a control based on sliding-mode and proportional-integral control is proposed. The performance of the developed control scheme is experimentally validated using the system prototype, the TDK-Lambda G100-17 renewable energy emulator source, the DS1104 board, and the Matlab-Simulink software. Experimental tests are conducted with two different power supply scenarios: 1) a time-varying input voltage and 2) a commercial photovoltaic panel emulator. The obtained experimental results show the robustness of the controller proposed here to abrupt disturbances in the system parameters and torque.