The electric machine emulator (EME), using digital simulation and power electronics to emulate the characteristics of actual machines, can greatly accelerate the testing of electric drives. However, most existing EMEs are based on typical L filter and linear controller, which causes control conflicts and bandwidth limitation. To address this issue, this paper presents an EME based on LCL filter with passive damping for a three-phase permanent magnet synchronous motor. To improve the dynamic emulating accuracy, a dual closed-loop deadbeat predictive current control algorithm is proposed, which is computationally efficient and easy to implement. The system stability is analyzed in the discrete domain, and the parameter constraints of the filter are obtained. Then, two unknown input observers are designed to compensate for the disturbance currents and voltages caused by modeling errors. Moreover, instead of the empirical method, a theoretical one considering the harmonic suppression, bandwidth, stability and resonance is presented for filter design. Finally, the performance of the proposed EME is validated through simulation and experimental results under various conditions such as machine start-up, torque step change, and speed reversal.INDEX TERMS Electric machine emulator (EME), LCL filter, dual closed-loop deadbeat predictive current control, unknown input observer. NOMENCLATURE

This article proposes a novel space vector pulse width modulation (SVPWM) scheme for multilevel converters in abc coordinate system, in which the reference vector is decomposed into an offset vector and a remainder vector that can be synthesized using two-level SVPWM. The switching state satisfying a specific relationship is first selected as the offset vector such that the common-mode components are eliminated and therefore the phase voltages are decoupled. A dynamic reference point mechanism establishes a one-to-one correspondence between all available vector combinations and one unique variable, i.e., the number of level shifts. This feature further facilitates a general approach to determining the optimum switching states to satisfy different control objectives, such as common-mode voltage rejection. Besides, phase decoupling enables the introduction of carrier-based modulation to simplify implementation, where the duty cycle of the zero vector can be flexibly adjusted while the non-zero vectors remain the same to generate an equivalent output. Consequently, two-level SVPWM-based method and carrierbased PWM are combined to exploit their respective strengths. The proposed scheme achieves overmodulation operation, and provides more flexibility, i.e., redundant switching states and adjustable duty cycles, to optimize switching patterns. Simulation and experimental results validate the proposed algorithm.

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