Instructional laboratory for practical investigation of electric drive control

The study discusses the design principles of instructional laboratory equipment applied for practical investigations of electric drive control. The laboratory workstations comprise of two-motor hardware systems where each motor is controlled by a real-time DSP board. A control structure under test is assembled at the software level using a number of control elements, which is then compiled into a control algorithm for the microcontroller. In order to provide safe test execution, the control algorithm operates under the supervision of a real-time core software ensuring protection of the motors and the power converters. Due to the improvement in the reliability of hardware operation, the rated power of the motors and converters is increased to >1 kW to provide a proper characterisation of electric drives similar to industrial installations. The study also describes the laboratory hardware and software details using an example of the control system for an induction motor based on flux-vector control strategy. The example demonstrates configuring the control systems, compiling it into the execution code, the test procedure and result analysis