When engineers at ATB Technologies were developing a high-performance compressor for a fuel cell vehicle, they had to deliver on stringent customer requirements. The compressor’s electric drive motor had to provide high torque, rapid acceleration, and a maximum speed of 20,000 rpm. To meet these requirements, they chose a brushless permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) for the design.
To maximize the performance and efficiency of the PMSM, the engineers used MathWorks tools for Model-Based Design to develop sophisticated control algorithms that incorporated three-phase vector control, field-oriented control (FOC), and field-weakening techniques. The team has adopted Model-Based Design incrementally—on this project adding production code generation to a process that already employed modeling and simulation of designs for early verification.
“On past projects, we simulated and verified our Simulink designs before hand coding the implementation,” says Markus Schertler, development engineer at ATB Technologies. “After transitioning to automatic code generation, the quality and modularity are better and the iterations are faster, so we can move rapidly from the first prototype to the final series.”