Hardware-in-the-Loop Emulation of Linear Induction Motor Drive for MagLev Application

Linear induction machines are widely used in transportation systems due to their many advantages. Design and prototyping of electric machines are an expensive and time consuming process; hardware-in-the-loop simulation provides an efficient alternative. In this paper, a field-programmable gate array-based real-time digital emulation of single-sided linear induction motor with the drive system is proposed. Implementation of the model is performed in both fixed-point using Xilinx system generator and floating-point number representations using a handwritten VHSIC Hardware Description Language code. Then, an evaluation in terms of real-time step-size and accuracy as well as hardware resource utilization is provided. The whole design was fully paralleled, which resulted in a considerable reduction of model execution time. The minimum time step of 2.3 microseconds and 0.8 microseconds was achieved for floating-point and fixed-point implementations, respectively. The results of the real-time simulation are verified by the experimental results as well as a 2-D finite element simulation in JMAG software.