Failure analysis of AC motor drives via FPGA-based hardware-in-the-loop simulations

The paper deals with an extensive analysis of power converters failures in AC motor drives by exploiting the capability of a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation platform to emulate the real-time behavior of electrical machines and power converters. In this way it is possible to investigate the effects of power converter faults in electrical drives with the aim to propose solutions that allow to reduce the periods of drives inoperability. In this paper, a suitable realization of a test bench combining an embedded system based on a FPGA board with a high-level graphical programming language is proposed to replace part of the electrical drive hardware. Differently than standard approaches for FPGA programming, which are normally based on hardware description languages, the proposed solution exploits an environment software platform with a high level of abstraction that leads to a good trade-off between accuracy and hardware resources, also allowing a faster prototyping procedure. The proposed HIL solution has been used to study some common faults occurring in power converters, evaluating the behavior of a standard drive operating with different control algorithms.