Real-Time Emulation of Electrical Machines for Hardware-in-the-Loop Applications

• Author / Creator

  Roshandel Tavana, Nariman

• Electrical machines are the critical components of many industrial systems, and their design, test, and simulation are now becoming increasingly demanding due to emphasis on energy efficiency, and performance improvement.

  Today, hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) technology is progressively being utilized as the preferred, reliable, cost-effective alternative in a virtual scenario for tedious, time-consuming, and expensive tests on real devices. Thus, real-time digital hardware emulation of electrical machines in HIL configuration allows engineers to test the newly prototyped drive systems or controllers against the virtual machine model under hazardous and abnormal conditions in a non-destructive manner. Moreover, in the design procedure the emulated machine model can help designers optimize the machine performance by running the real-time model as many times as they need to reach the desired goals in a short time.

  Owing to the rapid advances in the digital hardware technology, field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are gaining increasing popularity as the fastest, most reliable, and preferred computational engine by providing high frequency computational clock cycle and massive amount of logic resources for various computationally expensive applications.

  This thesis provides a framework for real-time emulation of commonly used electrical machines with different levels of modeling complexity. The FPGA is employed in this work for the high performance data processing to meet the stringent real-time step-size constraints. The FPGA-based real-time emulated machine performances are compared with the experimental measurements and finite element solutions to demonstrate the accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed approaches for HIL applications.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Induction Machine
  • Electrical Machines
  • Analytical Space Harmonic Model
  • Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor
  • Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA)
  • Magnetic Equivalent Circuit Model
  • Hardware-in-the-Loop Application
  • Real-Time Simulation

• Graduation date

  Fall 2015

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Doctor of Philosophy

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3RF5KM5K

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.