An FPGA-based design for joint control and monitoring of permanent magnet synchronous motors

We present an FPGA-based design approach that will allow motor control and on-board condition monitoring to be achieved in parallel using the same set of physical variables. The key idea lies in exploiting the parallelism of FPGAs to achieve the joint objectives of control and monitoring using common physical variables, namely motor phase currents. For illustration, a permanent magnet synchronous machine (PMSM) governed by Field Oriented Control (FOC) and health monitoring using Motor Current Signature Analysis (MCSA) is considered. Since FOC is computationally intensive, the control algorithm is optimized for speed using distributed pipelining and an FFT-core is utilized for MCSA. The design stage uses MATLAB/Simulink for the reference control coupled with HDL coder for VHDL generation. The synthesis and timing analysis are done with Altera's Quartus II. The tool-chain allows easy analysis and optimization of model-based motor control algorithms. The results show that the joint objectives can be obtained with decreased current and torque ripple at the expense of modest increases in resource utilization.