Effective high voltage/current motor control methods?

I'm working on a project that requires me to spin light to heavy stuff at certain RPMs to determine their center of gravity. Depending on the mass of the object, we require motors with as low as 0.5 HP to as high as 30 HP. We plan to have this contraption both running in the lab and at a factory, which means the motor switching side has to accept 90 to 600 VAC, all single phase. The motor and voltage combinations would not have peak currents exceeding 40Arms. (The higher horsepower ones will only be run at the factory)

Given that we're doing everything from scratch and can select any motor type (AC, DC, Stepping (?)) and modulation (direct TRIAC switching, rectify and PWM control with SCR/IGBT, etc), what is the most cost-effective motor type and modulation combination?

Of course we will be using different motors for different masses, but I'm trying to have a single electronic design to control all the motors.

You can use a pwm driver for smaller dc motors, and for larger stuff the most efficient way in time and money would be to use an ac motor and a commercial inverter, building an inverter isnt a good idea unless you have a half million pound lab and top engineers.
Ac motors are good if you dont need to stop at a known position, you could find out the exact point of out of balance easy enough, commercial wheel balancers calculate where to put the weight, stop the wheel, then the operator turns the wheel by hand until the machine tells him to stop and fit the weight, if this isnt practical or if the whole process is autmated and you need to position the load accurately then you'll need a servo drive, you can get these ac or dc but your talking a lot more cash, esp for 30kw.

Depends on how good you are with power electronics and control, also how many engineers you have to build this.

At my workplace we use three-phase permanent magnet switched reluctance motors, we use rectifier / inverter blocks from Sensitron. See https://www.sensitron.com/motorcontrollers.htm
we use the :
"Three-Phase IGBT BRIDGE with BRAKE IGBT, Three-Phase Half Controlled BRIDGE with INRUSH SCR"
from page 8 of the brochure, and build everything else ourselves. However you could just buy the whole kit from Sensitron.

Depends on what your budget is, and what your experience is. IF you don't have either budget or experience then its game over I'm afraid.

Thank you dr pepper and Misterbenn for the advice!

dr pepper:
Regarding the use of smaller DC motors, is there an advantage to rectifying the AC voltage and using PWM compared to using a TRIAC to gate a capacitor started AC motor? Our current prototype uses TRIAC control but the cost of TRIACs seem to rise very fast once we go above 400V rating. There's also this buzzing noise which I guess it due to the TRIAC being switched on.

Misterbenn:
How well protected are these modules? The datasheets aren't readily available, but I'm wondering if we need to overrate our part requirements. For example, would **broken link removed** "AlSiC Modules: 600V, 20A 3-Phase Bridge" suit our 600V application or do we have to get a higher rated module to account for possible transients?

Using a triac on a synchronous motor isnt a good idea, an ac motor is designed to run synchronously with the freq of the supply, using phase angle control forces the motor to run asynchronously, making the motor very ineffecient and possibly overheating it.
Rectifying the ac mains then using pwm to generate a sine wave profile is how commercial ac drives do it, and is the preffered method.
If you use a universal motor (ones with brushes) then you can use a simple phase angle triac control method, this is how the speed control in a common electric drill works.

Xieliwei,

In terms of protection, I presume you mean overvoltage and switching transients. The module you pointed out is a rectifier and inverter integrated into one package. So if your input AC is 600Vac then your rectified voltage will be much higher. In any case for a 600V system if you consider voltage surges and switching transients then you would really want to go for 1200V silicon to avoid single event burnout.

How many people are in your development team, building an inverter from the ground up is not a simple task and will take time.

Seems like a tall order for an all in one. I would make a small DC system and a big AC system.

Can I ask if this is a motor-center of mass problem or a center of mass problem?

because for spinning, I'd try to look at 3 phase variable speed drives. Input can be single phase up to a certain HP.

In your system, there probably is some commonality, just not sure how a "center of gravity" measurement is done.
Block diagram it and change the drivers.

Some ideas include:
PWM
A commercial variable speed drive (3-phase?)
Stepper motor driver - usually way different than anything else. Usually pulse and direction inputs.
Having an AC unit, a DC unit and a Stepper unit with various power stages.

Thank you all for the replies! They are certainly very insightful!

dr pepper:
Understood, I will keep that in mind.

Misterbenn:
We're just a team of 4 engineers. We do have half a year to get this done, but it may indeed be out of our combined abilities.

4pyros:
From what I've got from you people so far, I guess having a single electronic design in reasonable time is out of the question. Perhaps a good compromise instead of having two separate designs is to have a modular design and only swap out the driver modules, like KeepItSimpleStupid suggested?

KeepItSimpleStupid:
I'm not sure if I understood you correctly, but we have a lightly coupled air bearing platform on which widgets are mounted. The platform then spins at various RPMs during which a position sensor and two force sensors are read to determine the direction and magnitude of the centripetal force brought about due to the misalignment of the center of mass with respect to the asis of rotation. The offset of the center of mass can then be determined and the operator applies the offset to the mounted widget. We then repeat the test again either to confirm or get a more accurate measurement.

We did consider stepper motors but since we don't need precise positioning and how "jumpy" steppers are at low speeds, coupled with the increased price, we decided to strike them off our list. Indeed there should be some commonality and I think we'll be moving towards modularising the driver from the control part, at least for the hardware design.

OK, so its a COM problem. So. Buy a variable speed drive that will handle your largest load or most common load and do experiments to see where it craps out.

Buy overlapping units until a variable speed drive/motor combination ceases to work.

Then you may have to change to DC PWM motors for lighter loads.