Hardware Implementation of an AIS-Based Optimal Excitation Controller for an Electric Ship

The operation of high energy loads on Navy´s future electric ships, such as directed energy weapons, will cause disturbances in the main bus voltage and impact the operation of the rest of the power system when the pulsed loads are directly powered from the main dc bus. This paper describes an online design and laboratory hardware implementation of an optimal excitation controller using an artificial immune system (AIS) based algorithm. The AIS algorithm, a clonal selection algorithm (CSA), is used to minimize the effects of pulsed loads by improved excitation control and thus, reduce the requirement on energy storage device capacity. The CSA is implemented on the MSK2812 DSP hardware platform. A comparison of CSA and the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is presented. Hardware measurement results show that the CSA optimized excitation controller provides effective control of a generator´s terminal voltage during pulsed loads, restoring and stabilizing it quickly.