Power electronics and drives laboratory learning environment for electric vehicles

The popularity of electric vehicles as a study object among students in the engineering sector is rising. Although there is a wide variety of educational textbooks and training material for theory, the choice of a laboratory setup for motor control is limited, too large, and costly. Technical trainers on one side and vendor-specific microcontroller demonstration kits on the other side. In this paper, the requirements and implementation of a laboratory set-up are discussed which can be used to teach the application of motor drives including permanent magnet dc motors, brushless dc motors, stepper motors, and permanent magnet synchronous motors. The laboratory setup can be combined with either an analog control for cascaded current, speed, and position control or a digital control can be added for a sensorless brushless control and the field-oriented control of the permanent magnet motor. The digital control is ranging from a cost-effective Arduino-nano, STM-Nucleo to the Field Oriented Control enhanced C2000 platform, including the Instaspin-FAST(sensorless) micro controllers. The student learning objectives include the details for the inverter topology, like gate driver and shoot-through protection and blanking time compensation as well as setting up current-torque control on the dc and permanent magnet synchronous machines, and finally the implementation of a field-oriented controller. Various modulation schemes can be implemented as well as the methods for sampling motor terminal currents and voltages. An extensive set of online simulations is guiding and preparing the student for each laboratory exercise.