A CRITICAL STUDY OF CLINTON BENNETT’S THOUGHTS TOWARDS SIRAH OF THE HOLY PROPHET ﷺ

Sirah of the Holy Prophet ﷺ is the topic on which a lot of work has been done both in the Muslim and non-Muslim world. For Muslims it was the source of aspiration and adaptation for the practical purposes of social life while for the non-Muslims it was the source of inquisitiveness and understanding Islam as a successful religion in the past and present time. Therefore, Muslim enthusiastic interest in the biography of the Holy Prophet ﷺ developed and evolved into a regular science while the west has modified the knowledge of biography according to their own order of preference but within the same biographic precedents. Both have tried to reconstruct the biography of the Holy Prophet ﷺ historically, chronologically and logically. Clinton Bennett is one of the western scholars who has contributed not only in the Islamic literature but also the biographic field. His work consists of numerous issues in Islam. Whatever he has learned from Islam and the Sirah of Holy Prophet and thus concluded in the form of his own thoughts, he has expressed most of them in his famous five books for example ‘In Search of Muhammad’, ‘Muslims and Modernity’, ‘Studying Islam’, ‘Interpreting the Qur’an’, and ‘Victorian Images of Islam’ (doctoral thesis)’. This study focuses on Clinton Bennett’s work on Sirah specifically with his broader view of the subject. This research is descriptive and analytical in nature and presents a detailed analysis of the work it is based upon.

Fixed Frequency Sliding Mode Control for Power Electronic Converters

In the modern era of industrialization, power electronic converters have gained key importance due to their wide range of applications such as; use in arc furnaces, in duction heating systems, variable speed drives of motors, power supplies of various electronic systems, fluorescent lamps, elevators and cooling systems. Furthermore, the low-cost proliferation of power electronic devices due to the technological de velopments in the semiconductor industry has made them an attractive choice for integrating renewable energy resources. They are the essential and integral part of the systems providing solutions to issues like voltage sag, swell, frequency reg ulation, current sharing among different renewable energy resources, power factor correction and voltage regulation in different types of micro-grids. In all the above-mentioned applications, the robustness of the system under dif ferent load and line conditions depend upon the control algorithm of the power electronic converters. This is why the research in the field of power electronics has been focused on the control of power converters during the last decade. Among different types of control techniques, Sliding Mode Control (SMC) is renowned for its disturbance rejection and parameter invariant nature which makes it an irre sistible choice for controlling such systems. However due to physical constraints of the switching components, ideal condition of infinite frequency cannot be sat isfied. This causes the system to operate at finite but time varying switching frequency which is a serious issue for power electronic converters as they consist of passive components whose size and value depends upon the switching frequency. Moreover, the time varying switching frequency degrades the power quality and causes electromagnetic interference (EMI) issues in case of grid connected power converters. In the first phase of this research, a fixed frequency sliding mode controller uti lizing an integral sliding manifold is designed to improve the dynamic response of the power converter regulating the grid voltage, in the presence of unknown x load condition and uncertain network parameter of the micro-grid. A special purpose test rig is designed to experimentally validate the results in comparison with conventional PI controllers. In the second phase of the research, the power quality issues regarding DC micro grids are addressed. Power quality issues have been widely discussed regarding AC power systems but discussion regarding DC power quality in micro-grids is rare in research community because in past power transmission was carried out using AC systems only. However, in the recent years DC grids and transmission has emerged as an attractive solution to integrate renewable energy resources. Hence, to enhance the power quality, a fixed frequency SMC is proposed with harmonic cancellation and chattering reduction, using a PI type sliding manifold. Experimental results are presented to validate the theoretical derivations using the test rig. Finally, a new method based upon filter extraction of the equivalent control is proposed to fix the switching frequency in power converters controlled by SMC. The technique is implemented on a boost converter and the results are presented in comparison with PWM-SMC. Rigorous mathematical analysis is provided along with experimental results to validate the proposed technique.