LabView-based programming toolchains for Power Electronics control applications: from implementation to deploy

Nowadays, even a common power converter can exhibit an increased number of active devices and higher switching frequency than ever to satisfy a higher control performance demand. This results in an increased complexity related to the control board, where usually a combined C (or P, DSP) and FPGA are both installed. Those two ‘actors’ require a completely different programming approach and development tools from those employed by traditional boards. Accordingly, control algorithm development is considered a ‘time consuming’ task within a research or industrial project. IDE (Integrated Development Environment), provided by the control platforms manufacturers or third parties, are constantly moving from the classical, old, text-based approach to a new, fast and simple to learn graphical programming method. Moreover, a high level of abstraction is usually demanded in order to accelerate the learning time even on non-specialist workers; however, a full control on the hardware is still mandatory. This class will cover the methodologies to switch to new graphical programming development environments, starting from a review and going into the most promising solutions. Code splitting between targets, best practices, and code efficiency will be part of the tutorial. The usage of FPGA has some inherent drawbacks such as the long compiling time: FPGA co-simulation and hardware-in-the-loop techniques will be also covered to help the designer workflow.

Theory and practice with the National Instruments sbRIO-9651 and Linux real-time OS. Insight view and develop of specific Power Electronics and Drives applications using LabVIEW integrated development environment:

LabVIEW basic concepts, front panel and block diagram, debugging, programming guidelines. Application development. Graphical programming of the Real-Time and FPGA targets. Communication between targets. Code efficiency and best practices.
Development of the FPGA main scheduler and synchronization with the on board Processor, PWM modulator with configurable dead-time.
Floating-point math operations on FPGA target. (a must have!)
Development of high-performance control algorithms such as repetitive control, resonant controllers, Model Predictive Control and combined control structures. Code splitting between targets. Insight view of PWM modulators for multilevel power converter topologies.
LabVIEW FPGA/ NI-Multisim co-simulation, a very powerful tool to test the developed FPGA code.
Closed loop tests with the Hardware-in-the-loop simulator.

Link to the course page.

Lecturer: Prof. Alessandro Lidozzi, Università di Roma Tre