VHDL-AMS traction drive model including a 3D description of thermal effects

Abstract

This paper proposes the complete closed-loop model development of a railway traction drive, also taking into account the coupling between electrical and thermal effects. The work is based on VHDL-AMS and consists of four sections: the first deals with the compact model development of the asynchronous motor and its corresponding control sequence; the second is devoted to the DC/AC converter with PWM driving sequence and including an analytical description of the switching and conduction losses of the switches (IGBT-diode pairs); the third part presents the modeling of thermal aspects, which relies on a distributed 3D description of the semiconductor devices and their package, and, finally, those three parts are interconnected with each other inside the control loop. The resulting overall model is ideal for simulations of the traction drive over realistic mission profiles.