INVERTER CONTROL APPARATUS, A VEHICLE DRIVETRAIN INCORPORATING SUCH APPARATUS, AND A METHOD OF CONTROLLING AN INVERTER FOR PROVIDING POWER TO AN A.C. MACHINE

摘要

An inverter (34) which provides power to an A.C. machine (28) is controlled by a circuit (36) employing PWM control strategy whereby A.C. power is supplied to the machine at a preselectable frequency and preselectable voltage. This is accomplished by the technique of waveform notching in which the shapes of the notches are varied to determine the average energy content of the overall waveform. Through this arrangement, the operational efficiency of the A.C. machine is optimized. The control circuit includes a micro-computer and memory element which receive various parametric inputs and calculate optimized machine control data signals therefrom. The control data is asynchronously loaded into the inverter through an intermediate buffer (38). In its preferred embodiment, the present invention is incorporated within an electric vehicle (10) employing a 144 VDC battery pack (32) and a three-phase induction motor (18).