Hardware in Loop Simulations of Electric Drives

Abstract: Electric drives are crucial components of powertrain of modern vehicles. They need to be controlled effectively to deliver a comfortable and efficient driving experience. The control unit needs to be robust to handle extreme operating conditions and faults in a safe manner. Hardware in Loop (HIL) setups can be used to develop such control units for majority of real-life test cases, without involving physical drives. Typical HIL setup includes the controller (hardware) under test connected to a high fidelity computer model of the controlled system (plant). Thanks to the efficient, inexpensive, consistent and nondestructive nature of HIL setups, they are widely used for research and development in the automotive industry. This thesis focuses on developing such a HIL setup for latest electric drive architecture at Scania CV AB. In this thesis, the plant models are programmed onto a field programmable gate array (FPGA). The HIL setup, plant models and the controller are continuously improved throughout the thesis to achieve higher fidelity and real time replication of the internal permanent magnet synchronous machine under consideration. Software in Loop (SIL) strategy, wherein all components are represented by computer models, is also applied for rapid developments. Several aspects like flux linkage-based and inductance-based machine models, choice of arithmetic, discretization methods, noise, delays, etc. are studied and optimised during the thesis. Validation is conducted for both SIL and HIL setups and above 95% correlation with physical drive’s performance is reported. Stable operation and repeatability of the developed HIL setup ensure that the framework is scalable to be applied to other drives and control units.