Industrial Automation and Machinery

Industry Segments

• Motors, Drives, and Power Electronics
• Industrial Robotics and Manufacturing Equipment
• Process Automation Systems and Industrial Controls
• Power Generation and Distribution Equipment

Power Generation and Distribution Equipment

Engineers are increasingly required to develop power generation equipment that reduces pollution and emissions and uses alternative fuel sources. MathWorks software supports the development of power generation and distribution equipment for emerging energy sources, including:

Solar Wind Waste

Tidal Fuel cell Biomass

MATLAB® enables engineers to perform a broad range of calculations and design trade-offs, such as efficiency and optimization studies; signal, thermal, stress, and vibration analyses; dynamic modeling; and control algorithm design.

With Simulink®, they model and simulate mechanical, electrical, chemical, and control system behavior in one environment. SimDriveline™ software adds elements for modeling and simulating turbomachinery, while SimPowerSystems™ software lets them model electrical systems. Third-party products provide specialized models in popular tools such as AspenTech Aspen Dynamics and Process Systems Enterprise gPROMS. These can be incorporated into Simulink simulations for chemical, thermodynamic, and other processes.

Plug Power used MATLAB and Simulink environments to model fuel cell systems and rapidly test new algorithms before implementing them on hardware.

MATLAB and Simulink provide a unified platform for developing and verifying control systems using classical and modern feedback control design approaches. Stateflow® software adds state-machine tools for designing sophisticated mode, supervisory, and fault-detection control strategies. Using Simulink, engineers simulate and test control strategies against accurate plant models in scenarios that would be difficult to reproduce using the actual system.

Control engineers can automatically generate ANSI C code from their control algorithms for a rapid prototyping system, such as the xPC Target™ product, or for the target processor. The C code works on any embedded processor. The MathWorks offers target-specific support for popular implementation platforms, such as the TI C2000™ DSP product. Third-party products based on MathWorks software let them implement algorithms directly on FPGAs.

Featured Customers

• Plug Power models systems and rapidly tests new algorithms to accelerate fuel cell control development.
• Alstom generates production code for safety-critical power converter control systems.