Modeling of an electric induction motor on FPGA for testing in HIL environment

Nowadays more and more car manufacturers are shifting their business towards electric mobility due to environmental and pollution issues. This type of ecological transition has led to the development of increasingly complex vehicles with different dynamics, moving from the focus of fossil fuels to electric batteries. With electrification, technological progress and increasingly detailed customer necessities, the development of sophisticated control units and controllers is becoming a central theme in the design phases of new vehicles. The union of the themes of control and electric mobility are the basic ideas that led to the conception of the thesis in question, which has as its central objective the development of a testing environment for an automotive controller to handle a propulsion system. In particular, the thesis is focused on the Hardware In the Loop system, the most actual testbench in the context of the virtual validation. One of the critic aspect of signals in HIL context, is the real time modelling of electric systems. In fact, to model electrical quantities in real-time requires a high computational capacity which appears to be in trade-off with the accuracy of the model itself. In this regard, the hardware platform used during the thesis is based on a HIL system that includes Full Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices. One of the main objectives of an HIL system is to close the control loop with the control unit, also called device under test (DUT) The goal of the thesis is to create an asynchronous motor model (SCIM) and an inverter for automotive applications (propulsion) based in part on FPGA hardware, which is at the same time parameterizable, so that it can be calibrated, and therefore used for different types of vehicles. In other words, configuring an HIL test engine means setting up a series of physical inputs and outputs to which can be connected to an external component to be tested. In the case presented here, the device under test is a control unit capable of controlling the engine, but in general it is quite usual to see the HIL testing when there are small and low-power components such as relays, for which it would be much more expensive to model and simulate all rather than not using the actual component, placing it in a simulated system. The main issues that will be discussed in this thesis will therefore be: the HIL systems, the SCIM electric motor, the device under test (DUT), that is the control unit of the engine to be tested external to the HIL system and FPGA systems. To conclude the thesis, the engine model designed is compared with a real and existing one of the dSPACE in order to compare their performances and be able to draw conclusions.