Calculation of Optimized Pulse Patterns for Electric Drives with an End-To-End Differentiable Simulation Framework

Calculating optimized pulse patterns (OPPs) for electric drives can be computationally expensive due to the complex and eventually nonlinear problem space. Furthermore, the often-applied multi start approach to find the global minimum increases the numerical burden. Hence, in this work, an end-to-end differentiable JAX-based simulation framework to calculate OPPs for electric drives is presented, enabling the efficient determination of the cost function gradients, therefore allowing faster optimization times. In addition, the introduced nonlinear drive model based on measured flux linkage maps, shows a significant difference with concern to the stator current trajectories in comparison to the linear model. This directly affects the loss and torque calculation during the optimization, which has a major impact on the resulting pulse pattern. The multi objective optimization highlights the best possible OPPs, which are further analyzed in comparison to a triangular carrier-based pulse width modulation. The selected OPP reduces the losses of approx. 8% and produces a 39% lower torque ripple.