In the last decade, significant progress has been made in electrification, especially in the applications of electrical vehicles, renewable energies, and industry automations, which imposed much more complicated working conditions to electric machines as well as the drive converters. More advanced features, such as the control strategies, functionality, stability, and reliability of machine drive systems, need to be characterized and validated. Thus, there is an emerging need to accurately recreate the behaviors of electric machine drive systems from more aspects for comprehensive tests. This article aims to foster and investigate the mission profile emulation technologies for the testing of electric machine drive systems. The key factors of the system to be emulated are first clarified, and then different testing concepts are summarized and compared, including dynamometer test, controller hardware-in-the-loop simulation, power hardware-in-the-loop simulation, and power-electronics-based emulation. The features of power-electronics-based emulation, which is considered as a promising trend, will be further discussed with respect to the degrees of coupling with the drive converter, electric machine models, and control structures. Finally, challenges in the field of mission profile emulation for electric machine drive systems are discussed.

Published in: IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics ( Volume: 37, Issue: 7, July 2022)