Motor Test System Based On Virtual Instrument

Motor test plays an important role in the motor manufacture, and it is an core in this process to create an easy-to-use and powerful motor test system. The motor test system based on the traditional instrument has some problems, such as fixed structure, functional singleness, low automation, long development cycle, less expansion. In addition, most of existing test system based on General Computer has problems of inaccurate timing and poor real-time capacity by using Windows Multimedia Clock. Generic motor test system based on virtual instrument is developed to resolve those problems basically on LabVIEW development platform. Meanwhile, other two virtual instrument software is developed to measure the harmonic and the torque.This paper mainly talks about generic motor test system based on virtual instrument. According to the method of the software engineering, it is completed to design, develop and test. It realizes many functions, such as the serial communication, send/receive serial valid data, data display/storage, the serial port’s sending task with accurate timing. It also has a friendly man-machine interface, efficient execution efficiency. Besides, this paper also talks about the application of other two virtual instrument software. The main work done by the author will be described in the paper, which are listed as following items:(1) Analyzing and studying the composition and principle of the motor testing system.(2) The software requirements of virtual instrument are made clear. Appropriate development model is selected in comparison. The overall architecture, the software interface and the algorithm of every function module is defined strictly.(3) According to the definition above the step, the code is written by LabVIEW called graphical programming language. After coding, testing each function module and the entire system.(4) Producer/consumer design pattern is applied in the serial port communication, data analysis and display, which develops the powerful parallel processing abilities of LabVIEW and makes the program more efficient.(5) In the serial transmission module, the interference of between the sending tasks is resolved by a smart design. In the serial receiving module, error processing sub module is used to increase the fault tolerance ability of communication.(6) The LabVIEW timing cycle used in the motor test system, which makes that the timing precision of serial timing sending task reaches 2ms.(7) The application of other two virtual instrument software. After using NI’s oscilloscope card to acquire motor phase current, we codes by Lab VIEW for measuring the harmonic of the phase current. Detecting the torque of the motor by the torque sensor and serial communication.After the actual use, the motor test system based on virtual instrument has many characteristics, such as high real-time performance, convenient operation, great user’s experience, high practicability and stability, low testing cost, etc. This paper is a reference for the enterprise and university laboratory to construct the testing system based on virtual instrument.