uCube: Control platform for power electronics

Abstract

Abstract-This paper presents a versatile tool for development, control and testing of power electronics converters. In the last decade, many different expensive off-the-shelf tools for rapid prototyping and testing have been developed and commercialised by few market players. Recently, the increasing diffusion of low cost, Do It Yourself targeted development tools gained market shares previously controlled by conventional players. This trend has been driven by the fact that, despite their lower performances, many of these low cost systems are powerful enough to develop simple power electronics systems for learning and teaching purposes. This paper describes a control platform developed within the University of Nottingham, targeting at the market and application segment in between the expensive offthe-shelf control boards and the low cost emerging systems. The platform is based on the Microzed evaluation board, equipped with the Xilinx Zynq System-on-Chip. Its flexibility, features and performances will be addressed and examples of how they are being experimentally validated on different rigs will be provided.

Reuse of a Damaged Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor for Torque Ripple and Acoustic Noise Elimination using a Novel Repetitive Observer

“…The machine and control parameters are shown in Table I. The control algorithms are implemented on a high performance FPGA/DSP platform [10]. The test rig is as shown in Fig.…”

Radial Force Control of Multisector Permanent-Magnet Machines for Vibration Suppression

“…Description of the Experimental set-up (uCube) is based on the off-the-shelf Microzed board from Avnet, a low-cost development board based on the Xilinx Zynq-7000 All Programmable SoC [28]. The Zynq integrates in a single device a dual-core ARM CortexA9 based Processing System (PS) and a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) Programmable Logic (PL) [28]. The d − q axis feedback current control loops of each sector and the speed control loop rely on standard PI controllers.…”

Performance Improvement of Bearingless Multisector PMSM With Optimal Robust Position Control

“…The power module of the single inverter is a dual-in-line package intelligent power module (PS21A79) manufactured by Mitsubishi Semiconductor operated at 10 [kHz] switching frequency. The industrial control boards mounted on each inverter have been removed and substituted by one centralized and custom made control platform [27] (Fig. 8 b)) that communicates with the power modules gate drives by means of fibre optics cables.…”