Hardware-in-the-Loop Closed-Loop Experiments with an FPGA-based Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor Drive System and a Rapidly Prototyped Controller

Presented in this paper are the results of closed-loop control experiments using a virtual permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) drive implemented on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) card connected to an external controller. The FPGA-based PMSM motor drive is implemented on an eDRIVEsim simulator, based on the RT-LAB platform. The eDRIVEsim simulator implements 2 types of motor drive models, Park (d-q) and Finite Element Analysis (FEA), on an FPGA card of the simulator. The FPGA-based motor model is designed with Xilinx System Generator (XSG) blockset with no HDL hand coding. Both motor models compute motor currents using a phase-domain algorithm solver that can take into account the instantaneous variation of inductance and non-sinusoidal induced voltage. The FEA-type model uses inductance and Back-EMF profiles computed with JMAG-RT. The d-q model uses sinusoidal induced Back-EMF voltage and phase inductance values computed from Ld and Lq using the well-known Park transformation. A 3-phase LGBT inverter implemented in the FPGA chip drives the PMSM machine. The PWM controller is designed using Rapid Control Prototyping (RCP) methodology based on Simulink. It is implemented on an separate RT-LAB system using standard Opal-RT FPGA-based I/O cards for Analog Input capture and PWM generation. The paper presents results from the closed-loop control of the PMSM drive in both current control and speed control modes and discusses the advantages of using such a virtual test bench for motor drives.