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Accelerate the development and testing of motor controls and inverters with Simulink

Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing can accelerate the development of electric motor controllers and drives. You can use Simulink® and Speedgoat hardware to perform the validation and verification (V&V) of your hardware-under-test for both standard and fault conditions. Applications include testing embedded control hardware (Control HIL) and commissioning power drives against a virtual motor (Power HIL).

With Speedgoat solutions, you can perform real-time simulations of the drive, including encoders or resolver emulators, power drives, and a wide range of motor models. For instance, permanent magnet synchronous motors (PMSM), induction motors, switched reluctance motors, and brushless DC-motors are readily available. Furthermore, Speedgoat FPGA solutions can be used to emulate motors and drives at different levels of fidelity, from switching effects to motor models based on finite-element method (FEM) tools.

"Thanks to MathWorks and Speedgoat tools we can focus on our objective of designing control systems for power converters."

Piotr Dworakowski, The SuperGrid Power Converters team leader

  • Access various electrical modeling components and reference examples in Simulink®Simscape Electrical™Powertrain Blockset™, and Motor Control Blockset™. Reuse power electronics models from desktop simulation to real-time at different levels of fidelity in the same Simulink environment. 
  • Extend your plant model with ready-to-use I/O driver blocks. For example, capture high-frequency signals such as PWM from your controller, generate feedback signals such as quadrature encoder or resolver, and communicate using protocols such as SPI, I2C, EtherCat, or CAN.  
  • Monitor real-time signals including ripples and switching harmonics directly out of Simulink (on the CPU or FPGA). 
  • Execute Simulink® and Simscape Electrical™ models on multicore CPUs or FPGAs. Include FEM motor models and power converters with switching frequencies up to hundreds of kHz. Simulate state-of-the-art wide bandgap semiconductors on FPGAs and reach simulation time steps below one microsecond and a resolution of PWM switching signals as low as 4ns with FPGAs.  
  • Add more FPGA I/O modules to the system as your application grows, increasing the computational power and the number of I/O channel resources. The modules can be interlinked using an Aurora high bandwidth, low latency link.
Electric car Wind generators Inverter Electric motor

Electric car

Wind generators

Inverter

Electric motor


Featured Application Use Cases

Testing and Validation of Motor Controllers

Safely test your embedded motor controller using virtual electric motors, sensors, and drives with HIL testing (Control HIL). Deploy models of your electric plant from Simscape Electrical, Powertrain Blockset, or Motor Control Blockset to Speedgoat hardware with a few clicks. Capture switching signals with nanosecond resolution and emulate a wide range of sensors such as resolvers, encoders, LVDTs, RVDTs, and synchros.

Frequently Used I/O Interfaces 

Simulink Application Resources 

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High Fidelity Real-Time Simulation With FEM Motor Models

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Use Speedgoat FPGAs to perform accurate HIL simulations of electric vehicles (EV) and electric powertrains with bandwidths in the MHz range. Use the finite-element method (FEM) motor models in real-time simulations to reproduce non-linear effects, saturation, and space harmonics. For example, FEM models from leading tools like JMAG-RT or ANSYS Maxwell can be deployed to Speedgoat FPGAs. 

Frequently Used I/O Interfaces 

Simulink Application Resources 

Use Power HIL To Test Real Motor Drives Against Virtual Motors

Use a Speedgoat real-time system combined with a power amplifier to test motor drives against virtual motors with actual electrical power transfer. Advanced power hardware-in-the-loop  (Power HIL) enables testing of switching power converters and drives in real-time. From a few watts to hundreds of kilowatts.

Frequently Used I/O Interfaces 

Simulink Application Resources 

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Power Electronics Real-Time Simulation at Nanosecond Range

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Develop and test power electronics controls for wide bandgap semiconductors using Simulink and Speedgoat hardware. Deploy power converter topologies to multi-core CPUs and FPGAs to thoroughly test power electronics control hardware. Include dynamics like current ripples with switching frequencies of hundreds of kHz and signal conditioning at the nanosecond range.

Frequently Used I/O Interfaces 

Simulink Application Resources 

Test Industrial Protocol Interfaces

Verify the protocol interfaces of motor drives to high-level controls such as programmable logic controllers (PLC) to assess overall plant performance. You can verify the correct reaction to commands or qualify synchronous operation using industrial protocols. 

Frequently Used I/O Interfaces 

Simulink Application Resources 

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Testing Workflows​

Rapidly prototype control designs by applying rapid control prototyping, test embedded controllers with
hardware-in-the-loop simulation of digital twins, and leverage Speedgoat systems as embedded controllers.

Early Design
Rapid Control Prototyping
Implementation
Hardware-in-the-Loop
Embedded Deployment

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innovation with a modular controller hardware setup?

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