FPGA design methodology for industrial control systems—a review

This paper reviews the state of the art of fieldprogrammable gate array (FPGA) design methodologies with a focus on industrial control system applications. This paper starts with an overview of FPGA technology development, followed by a presentation of design methodologies, development tools and relevant CAD environments, including the use of portable hardware description languages and system level programming/design tools. They enable a holistic functional approach with the major advantage of setting up a unique modeling and evaluation environment for complete industrial electronics systems. Three main design rules are then presented. These are algorithm refinement, modularity, and systematic search for the best compromise between the control performance and the architectural constraints. An overview of contributions and limits of FPGAs is also given, followed by a short survey of FPGA-based intelligent controllers for modern industrial systems. Finally, two complete and timely case studies are presented to illustrate the benefits of an FPGA implementation when using the proposed system modeling and design methodology. These consist of the direct torque control for induction motor drives and the control of a diesel-driven synchronous stand-alone generator with the help of fuzzy logic

A microsystem design for controlling a DC motor by pulse width modulation using MicroBlaze soft-core

This paper proposes a microsystem based on the field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) electronic board. The preliminary objective is to manipulate a programming language to achieve a control part capable of controlling the speed of electric actuators, such as direct current (DC) motors. The method proposed in this work is to control the speed of the DC motor by a purely embedded architecture within the FPGA in order to reduce the space occupied by the circuit to a minimum and to ensure the reliability of the system. The implementation of this system allows the embedded MicroBlaze processor to be installed side by side with its memory blocks provided by Xilinx very high-speed integrated circuit (VHSIC) hardware description language (VHDL), Embedded C. The control signal of digital pulse-width modulation pulses is generated by an embedded block managed by the same processor. This potential application is demonstrated by experimental simulation on the Vertix5 FPGA chip

A Survey on FPGA-Based Sensor Systems: Towards Intelligent and Reconfigurable Low-Power Sensors for Computer Vision, Control and Signal Processing

The current trend in the evolution of sensor systems seeks ways to provide more accuracy and resolution, while at the same time decreasing the size and power consumption. The use of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) provides specific reprogrammable hardware technology that can be properly exploited to obtain a reconfigurable sensor system. This adaptation capability enables the implementation of complex applications using the partial reconfigurability at a very low-power consumption. For highly demanding tasks FPGAs have been favored due to the high efficiency provided by their architectural flexibility (parallelism, on-chip memory, etc.), reconfigurability and superb performance in the development of algorithms. FPGAs have improved the performance of sensor systems and have triggered a clear increase in their use in new fields of application. A new generation of smarter, reconfigurable and lower power consumption sensors is being developed in Spain based on FPGAs. In this paper, a review of these developments is presented, describing as well the FPGA technologies employed by the different research groups and providing an overview of future research within this field.The research leading to these results has received funding from the Spanish Government and European FEDER funds (DPI2012-32390), the Valencia Regional Government (PROMETEO/2013/085) and the University of Alicante (GRE12-17)

FPGAs in Industrial Control Applications

The aim of this paper is to review the state-of-the-art of Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technologies and their contribution to industrial control applications. Authors start by addressing various research fields which can exploit the advantages of FPGAs. The features of these devices are then presented, followed by their corresponding design tools. To illustrate the benefits of using FPGAs in the case of complex control applications, a sensorless motor controller has been treated. This controller is based on the Extended Kalman Filter. Its development has been made according to a dedicated design methodology, which is also discussed. The use of FPGAs to implement artificial intelligence-based industrial controllers is then briefly reviewed. The final section presents two short case studies of Neural Network control systems designs targeting FPGAs

Survey of FPGA applications in the period 2000 – 2015 (Technical Report)

Romoth J, Porrmann M, Rückert U. Survey of FPGA applications in the period 2000 – 2015 (Technical Report).; 2017.Since their introduction, FPGAs can be seen in more and more different fields of applications. The key advantage is the combination of software-like flexibility with the performance otherwise common to hardware. Nevertheless, every application field introduces special requirements to the used computational architecture. This paper provides an overview of the different topics FPGAs have been used for in the last 15 years of research and why they have been chosen over other processing units like e.g. CPUs

Implementation of an extended prediction self-adaptive controller using LabVIEW (TM)

The implementation of the Extended Prediction Self-Adaptive Controller is presented in this paper. It employs LabVIEWTM graphical programming of industrial equipment and it is suitable for controlling fast processes. Three different systems are used for implementing the control algorithm. The research regarding the controller design using graphical programming demonstrates that a single advanced control application can run on Windows, real time operating systems and FPGA targets without requiring significant program modifications. The most appropriate device may be selected according to the required processing time of the control signal and of the application. A relevant case study is used to exemplify the procedure

Measurements, Models, Systems and Design

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A Portable Implementation on Industrial Devices of a Predictive Controller Using Graphical Programming

This paper presents an approach for developing an Extended Prediction Self-Adaptive Controller employing graphical programming of industrial standard devices, for controlling fast processes. For comparison purposes, the algorithm has been implemented on three different FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) chips. The paper presents research aspects regarding graphical programming controller design, showing that a single advanced control application can run on different targets without requiring significant program modifications. Based on the time needed for processing the control signal and on the application, one can efficiently and easily select the most appropriate device. To exemplify the procedure, a conclusive case study is presented

Design and Development of FPGA based Controllers for Photovoltaic Power System

In the recent years owing to increased energy consumption and consequent rise in crude oil price and global climatic change have motivated researchers to focus towards harnessing power from renewable energy resources such as photovoltaic (PV), fuel cell, biomass and wind energy systems. Among the different renewable resources, PV technology is one of the fastest growing technologies, because of abundance availability of solar irradiance and it has no adverse environmental impacts. But, the cost of PV energy is higher than the other conventional sources owing to its low PV conversion efficiency. Therefore, research opportunities lie in applying power electronics and control techniques for harvesting PV power at higher efficiencies for appropriate utilization. For simulation, analysis and control design of a PV power system, an accurate model of the PV cell is essential because PV cell is the basic bulding block of a PV power system. To maximise the power generation of a PV system it is necessary that the PV array should be operated at the maximum power point. A maximum power point tracker (MPPT) is required in the PV system to enable it to operate at the MPP. The output current-voltage (I-V) and power-voltage (P-V) characteristics of a PV vell are non-linear and hence its power fluctuates in accordance with the variation in solar irradiance and temperature. During the last decade, a lot of research has been directed to develop efficient MPPT schemes. But, research opportunities are still promising for designing new MPPT algorithms and to address their digital implementation issues. Further, there lies challenge to design MPPTs that can handle partial shading conditions. The thesis first proposes development of new MPPT algorithms and different pulse width modulated-voltage source inverter control strategies for a PV system. Firstly an integral sliding mode MPPT controller (ISMC) has been proposed for achieving an effective MPPT scheme, and then a modified P&O MPPT controller is developed which is implemented using a real-time digital simulator called Opal-RT. The performance of the modified ISMC is compared with that of the conventional proportional integral (PI) MPPT controller using both MATLAB simulation and real-time experimentation. The performance of the modified P&O MPPT controller with fixed step size is compared with that of the conventional incremental conductance (Inc Cond) and P&O MPPT controllers, and these are validated by using Opal-RT and subsequently through FPGA implementation. A modified incremental conductance MPPT controller with variable step size is then proposed for handling partial shading conditions. The tracking performance of the proposed modified Inc Cond MPPT controller is also compared with that of the conventional Inc Cond MPPT controller, from the obtained results by using Opal-RT. Further, an experimental prototype PV set-up is developed in the laboratory to implement the proposed MPPT algorithms on the physical hardware. After having developed efficient parameter extraction algorithms for a PV panel, the thesis subsequently proposes five new MPPT algorithms such as Integral sliding mode MPPT, modified P&O MPPT, modified Inc Cond MPPT, Model predictive MPPT, and modified Inc Cond variable step size MPPT controllers. All these developed MPPT algorithms have been implemented on a Solar array simulator (SAS) PV system, in MATLAB/SIMULINK, OPAL-RT and on a prototype hardware PV set-up. From the obtained results, it is found that these MPPTs adjust the power of a PV system effectively to its maximum power value smoothly with fast response and accuracy whilst reducing the fluctuations in its power. Tracking performance of all these proposed MPPT algorithms are found to be superior to some of the existing MPPTs such as perturb and observe (P&O), incremental conductance (INC), HCC and adaptive HCC. Further more, a PV system is observed to be stable with all these proposed MPPTs. From the results obtained it is also confirmed that the proposed modified P&O MPPT exhibits better MPP tracking performance in terms of quick settling time and least steady state error. Further, less voltage fluctuation and less maximum overshoot are observed in the case of the proposed modified Inc Cond MPPT among all the proposed MPPT algorithms. The proposed controllers are also well suited to all weather conditions. A grid connected PV system involves a power conversion from DC power into AC power. Due to high switching frequencies of this conversion by inverter, there is a power loss. An efficient control scheme needs to be developed for integrating the PV system to the grid. The thesis then proposes a Model Predictive Control (MPC) for integrating a PV system to the grid. The performance of the MPC is compared with conventional hysteresis current controller (HCC) and also with that of an adaptive HCC (AHCC) through a real-time simulatin using the Opal-RT then through FPGA implementations. FPGA implementation of the controllers such as HCC, AHCC and MPC were also performed by using LABVIEW configured with NI-cRIO-9014 platform. For elimination of current harmonic and reactive power of the grid connected PV system, there is a need of designing a filter. The PV system based shunt active power filter (SAPF) with modified incremental conductance MPPT controller with variable step size is then designed. From the MATLAB simulation and real-time digital simulation studies it is envisaged that the proposed PV based SAPF exhibits good harmonics compensation