The output of the design suite is a simulation that includes a DC bus, 3 phase inverter, motor, motor control, and a mechanical load.
Closing the control loops for Id, Iq, and speed/torque is not an easy task. Also, the proper implementation of field weakening, Max-Torque-per-Ampere control, and Max-Torque-per-Volt control can be very challenging. With the Motor Control Design Suite, you can easily see the impact of these advanced motor control algorithms as they greatly expand your possible torque/speed operational envelope.
Determining the shaft position of a motor through sensored feedback or sensorless internal calculation both pose unique challenges. Sensorless control can be especially difficult with countless papers on low-speed operation, synchronization, among other topics. Typical implementations use a sliding mode observer, SMO, which can be a bit of “guess and test” to setup. Texas Instruments also has a proprietary sensorless algorithm, InstaSPIN, which is very robust & powerful and addresses many of the issues faced by SMO implementations. The issue with InstaSPIN is that there are many parameters it requires and simulating its operation is only possible through a Processor-in-the-loop (PIL) simulation.
Our Motor Control design suite easily takes your machine and hardware parameters and converts them into the parameters that InstaSPIN requires. Further, with our PIL module, you can easily simulate its operation. This combination of functionality allows you to easily implement one of the most robust and powerful sensorless control algorithms available.
Our Motor Control Design Suites implement digital control, z-domain, based PI controllers. The user can select different execution rates for the switching PWM, inner current loops, and outer torque or speed loops. The control algorithm can be easily implemented on a MCU with our embedded code generation options. For a sensorless implementation with InstaSPIN, the design suite will design a code-generation-ready simulation that will run without modification on TI launchpadXL development hardware.