Dynamic simulation of electric machines on FPGA boards

Abstract

This paper presents the implementation of an induction machine dynamic simulation on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) board. Using FPGAs as computational engines can lead to significant simulation speed gains when compared to a typical PC computer, especially when operations can be efficiently parallelized on the board. The textbook example of a free acceleration followed by a step load change is used to outline the basic steps of designing an explicit Runge-Kutta numerical ordinary differential equation (ODE) solver on the FPGA platform. The FPGA simulation results and speed improvement are validated versus a Matlab/Simulink simulation.