Use of dynamic emulation of mechanical loads in the design of adjustable speed applications

A rapid prototyping procedure is presented in the paper. An approach to the dynamic emulation of mechanical loads, the "hardware-in-the-loop" procedure where the applied prototype is reused for many different applications using the same drive, is explained and analyzed. Instead of the actual load, a torque driven machine is introduced. The load torque, which it produces, is calculated in such a manner, that the input/output behavior of the experimental system resembles one of the actual (emulated) one. A simple feedforward scheme, combined with a feedback controller, is used fore the calculation. In contrast to the existing references the method is simple and requires no torque measurement. The method is used for the evaluation of the control algorithms, regardless the control and estimation methods used. Algorithms are developed with the use of Matlab/Simulink and experiments are executed with the use of the dSPACE system.