Virtual Engineering Lab for Motor Testing and Development

Many companies choose technical specialists for their skills instead of their proximity, employing product development teams that are not all on site. During system experiments and testing, however, this distributed expertise must all have access to the hardware laboratory. To answer this need, Electro Standards Laboratories (ESL) has developed a collaborative testing and experimentation platform for electric motor and power systems that can be operated in real time over the Internet using standard Web browsers. This platform operates as a virtual engineering laboratory (VE-Lab) that allows for fully interactive control of actual system hardware. To understand the potential benefits of the VE-LAB, consider one example application: the development of a high-efficiency starter/generator for hybrid electric vehicles. With an induction motor starter/generator connected into the VE-LAB platform, controller algorithm developers at the ESL laboratory in Cranston, RI, and starter/generator designers at the automobile manufacturers in Detroit, MI, can perform Web-based remote experiments in real time over the Internet