Adjustable Speed Drive Project for Teaching a Servo Systems Course Laboratory

This paper describes an adjustable speed drive for a three-phase motor, which has been implemented as a design for a servo system laboratory course in an engineering curriculum. The platform is controlled and analyzed in a LabVIEW environment and run on a PC. Theory is introduced in order to show the sensorless algorithms. These are computed by means of speed feedback from speed and flux estimators, which provide tracking of these variables in spite of the presence of an uncertain load torque and changes in the time constant. The novel electronic architecture permits students to use low-cost hardware. The project was divided into several subsystems in order to give students the opportunity to construct a tuning procedure for torque and speed control loops.