PLATAFORMA: A useful tool for high level education, research and development

This work presents the PLATAFORMA system impact over the teaching and research activities of the lecturers and the post graduate students at Master and Doctorate levels working in the Power Electronics Industrial Systems group (Grupo de Sistemas Industriales de Electronica de Potencia, SIEP) of the Universidad Simon Bolivar. PLATAFORMA is an integrated test system intended for experiments requiring validation of different types of new strategies and control schemes, based on vector control theories, parametric estimation, neural networks and fuzzy logic control systems, applied to machine drives, and it can be also used for analyzing the effect of these control strategies over the mains quality. The equipment includes driver power stages, an instrumentation stage and a signal processing and control stage. PLATAFORMA has eliminated most of the tedious work that every single researcher or post graduate student in the GSIEP group had to do in order to obtain experimental results, enhancing the quality of the thesis and papers produced by the group members.