Performance of synchronized master-slave closed-loop control of AC electric drives using real time motion over ethernet (RTMoE)

• Autor(a) principal: Cordeiro, Armando
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Outros Autores: Manuel, José F. M., Fernao Pires, Vitor
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.21/12803
• topic: AC electric drives; Multi-motor synchronization methods; Master-Slave method; Industrial Ethernet; Industrial applications

Multi-motor driving servomechanisms are widely used in modern industry for high-performance applications involving synchronized control of position, speed, acceleration and deceleration. Several synchronous control schemes have been developed to achieve good speed or position tracking regardless of various uncertainties and load torque perturbations. However, these solutions have some disadvantages, namely the costs associated with the necessary interfaces to transmit hardware synchronization signals between multiple drives and difficulty to integrate other tools and communication networks. Recently, Industrial Ethernet network-based control systems are becoming increasingly popular for industrial applications and factory automation. To overcome some of these disadvantages this paper proposes an approach that uses a real-time Ethernet applied to a dual-motor master-slave synchronization system, without introducing significant degradation of speed or position in the application performance. With this solution the position reference from the master encoder is transmitted by the real-time Ethernet instead of the classic hardware interface. This allows the integration of different tools and the explore of other functionalities of electric drives. The performance of the proposed solution was tested using industrial equipment through several practical experiments. It was also compared with an existing solution based on hardware interfaces, to identify advantages, limitations and cost savings of using real-time Ethernet networks solutions in synchronized AC electric drives.