Design, simulation and HIL testing of an electric propulsion system of an electric scooter with brushless DC motor using field-oriented control Digital Twin of an electric scooter

Abstract: A motor control algorithm to control a brushless DC motor has been implemented and tested in this master thesis. Model-based development approach has been applied to implement the entire system that includes the control algorithm (Field-Oriented Control) and the model of a brushless DC motor. The model of BLDC motor is implemented in a such a way that any motor’s specification could be given as input and the model would work as a digital twin of that motor. It is a modular system. Certain rotor position sensors are also discussed in this thesis, but the focus is on implementation of the control algorithm with a modular motor model and performing real-time simulation and testing of the model. A sensor-less method is used to measure the speed in this model, using the back-EMF of the motor. The model was deployed on Speedgoat performance machine which has a Xilinx FPGA and a CPU that runs the motor in real-time. Texas Instrument MCU was used to test the control algorithm. The hardware were connected in a loop to perform Hardware-in-the-loop testing and evaluate the results. This was done to test the performance of the control algorithm on the TI MCU. A model-based approach is used with real-time simulation as it helps in testing extreme conditions and various faults in the system without using the actual hardware. The thesis research showed that several extreme conditions can be tested to check the performance of the controller on a hardware connected in a loop, without using the actual motor.