Implementation of an Electric Drive Digital Twin in a Networked Test Lab Environment

The concept of Digital Twin (DT) consists of a physical asset, a digital asset, and their bidirectional data exchange, differing the DT from concepts with lower level of integration. Availability of the bidirectional interconnection not only enables monitoring of system states but also allows automated control of the system. Leveraging the DT concept, this paper presents a practical implementation of an electric drive DT by means of a permanent magnet synchronous machine (PMSM) in a test lab environment. The approach aims to virtually sense the disturbance variable, here the acting load torque. By integrating an observer controller into the PMSM control loop, the DT enables compensation of the disturbance variable, which is not measurable in many applications. The results of the DT implementation recorded on the test bench demonstrate an effective disturbance compensation of the acting load torque by the observer controller. However, the results still show a deviation between the observed and measured load torques, indicating room for further refinement. This work serves as a first step towards further practical applications of the DT in the electric drive testing environment.