Real-Time Simulations of Electrical Machine Drives with Hardware-in-the-Loop

This paper presents a fully digital, real-time hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulator on PC-cluster, of electric systems and drives for research and education purpose. This simulator was developed with the aim of meeting the transient simulation needs of electromechanical drives and electric systems while solving the limitations of traditional realtime simulators. This simulator has two main subsystems software and hardware subsystem. The two subsystems were coordinated to achieve the real time simulation. The software subsystem includes Matlab toolbox and a C++ compiler. The hardware subsystem includes FPGA data acquisition card, the control board, the sensors, and the desired motor to be controlled. The use of a real-time simulator to achieve hardware- in-the-Loop (HIL) simulation allows rapid prototyping, motors testing, mechanical load emulation, and control strategies evaluation. . Several simulations with different motors were conducted using this system. The simulation results are outlined and discussed.