Systematic approach of rapid prototyping for EC drives in automotive applications

This paper describes the systematic approach towards rapid prototyping for the development of electronically commutated (EC) drives in automotive applications. The aims were to reduce development time as well as to offer a greater variability of possible drive solutions. For this purpose offline and online simulations are established for EC drives. For offline simulations an extensive library of permanent magnet synchronous machines has been developed featuring different electrical topologies and several levels of complexity in both Matlab and SABER. Also libraries of power inverters have been created with varying topologies including the correspondent control blocks. For online simulations dSPACE Prototyping hardware is used. As power converter a new highly modular inverter has been developed covering a broad range of EC drive applications. The rapid prototyping process has successfully been evaluated in practice. This enables the operation of EC drives at an early project stage without developing the corresponding electronic control units or handcoding software. Good results have been achieved in several concurrent projects where the development time could significantly be reduced.