Sophisticated Simulation Package Supports System Design

Apr 1, 2002 12:00 PM
By Sam Davis, Editor, Power Electronics Technology

The latest release of SIMPLORER^® provides a versatile and complete design solution for electromechanical systems, subsystems, and components. Version 5.0 can simulate power electronics and drives found in home appliances, automobiles, electric and hybrid vehicles, and military devices.

Based on a simulator coupling technology, SIMPLORER^® 5.0 employs an intuitive graphical user interface that allows fast and easy model generation using tailor-made simulation tools. These include circuit simulation, block diagrams, sophisticated electrical machine models, and state machines for digital and discontinuous systems. Designers may use all of the engineering languages simultaneously, eliminating the need for mathematical transformations and allowing them to create each aspect of the system using the most efficient modeling language. It allows engineers to develop models using a schematic-capture program. Oscilloscopes or digital displays show simulation results.

The new object-oriented simulation kernel design, with flexible memory management, allows designers to solve problems of virtually any size. They can now analyze large-scale problems, such as complete power networks of vehicles or power-distribution systems. Another improvement is the SML 2.0 modeling language. It's a versatile and flexible language that simplifies cross-referencing between different model abstraction levels. In addition to these features, SML can now accommodate model components in other modeling languages, such as SPICE. This feature also prepares SIMPLORER^® for its compatibility to VHDL-AMS, the recently adopted IEEE mixed-signal modeling language standard.

Version 5.0 completes the first step for integrating SIMPLORER^® with traditional finite element analysis (FEA) and analytical designer packages. RMxprt^™, an analytical design tool for a variety of electrical motors and generators, creates a highly accurate, nonlinear SIMPLORER^® system-level model and an FEA model for direct import into Maxwell^® 2D with its static, harmonic, and transient solvers. Here, designers can refine and optimize the initial design from RMxprt^™ based on FEA. After this process, Maxwell^® generates an improved-accuracy, system-level model using a state space modeling technique for a number of electrical machines verifying the system-level design. This enables concurrent engineering in the design of motors and drive systems. A similar solution for the design of switchmode power supplies is the integration of the PExprt^™ transformer design tool, with SIMPLORER^®.

The software combines a non-SPICE-based circuit simulator with a block diagram and state-machine simulator based on simulator-coupling technology. The circuit simulator handles the specific requirements of power electronic circuits. It provides electrical machine models, several accuracy levels for power semiconductors, and a variety of modeling techniques for nonlinear components — including multidimensional lookup tables. Additionally, a redesigned macro/subsheet handling supports the fast and efficient generation of hierarchical models and model libraries. Designers can edit and manage macro models, assign help files, and create symbols. The basis of the coupling technology is a simulation data bus that connects the internal solvers and allows the generation of models representing different physical domains. By using the most appropriate solver for each domain, designers can shorten simulation time compared to traditional simulation techniques. SIMPLORER^®'s simulator-integration interface allows co-simulation with external simulators, such as Matlab^®/Simulink^® or MathCAD^®.

SIMPLORER^® 5.0 is available for Windows 2000 and Windows NT. For more information, visit www.ansoft.com/products/em/simplorer. To download a free student version of the software, visit www.ansoft.com.

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