openinverter forum

After many problems I now have my Prius Gen 3 inverter running and hooked up to one of the front motors from the Outlander PHEV. Why this combination? Honestly there's no really good reason other than that the motor was cheap and I like the idea of inverter/dc-dc/charger in a single unit.

Anyway, did some initial tests tonight and only got motor to vibrate not rotate. Appreciate it if anyone has any experience with these and might be able to make any suggestions.

So far:

- Hooked up to 30V (X3 car batteries in series)
- Started inverter in manual mode
- Set fslip to 10 and ampnom to 100

Played with boost a bit but not in any systematic way. Also tried swapping some phases over. FYI I have the position set to AB for now as getting some errors off resolver.

Appreciate any suggestions.

Just two hints: for synchronous motors (as I believe the Outlander motor to be) you need Resolver mode (and hardware) and FOC firmware

EDIT: if you want a sync motor to spin from the sine firmware, you need to start with very low fslipspnt like 1 or 2 and increments of 1Hz.

johu wrote: ↑Thu Jul 16, 2020 7:56 am Just two hints: for synchronous motors (as I believe the Outlander motor to be) you need Resolver mode (and hardware) and FOC firmware

EDIT: if you want a sync motor to spin from the sine firmware, you need to start with very low fslipspnt like 1 or 2 and increments of 1Hz.

Thank you! Much appreciated. Testing now.

Right, some success. Motor wouldn't spin up but would continue when turned. Wouldn't go higher than 1Hz though - just kept going at that speed whatever was entered into fslipspnt or ampnom.

Shall keep playing.

Looks like I'll be joining you with this motor, I've done a buy on a full front PHEV gearbox.

Excellent.

Thanks for the pointers @johu. Now on FOC firmware and have throttle control, though half way through throttle press it starts to decelerate. Could be lack of cooling, could be lack of juice (still only 35V from three rather tired car batteries). Could be sync offset still needs tuning a bit. Pretty sure throttle is set up right.

When setting up this motor I found the default value of 20000 for the current control integral gain 'curki' was far too high for this motor. With 20A of manual ID the plot shows very poor current control. It still spun fine but I could hear a white noise while the motor was running, especially noticeable at low speeds/frequency. As you would expect, this lack of control is more prominent at higher voltages (>300v). I reduced curki to around 3000 and that improved the control greatly. Any lower didn't make a lot of difference. I am using MG1 output so there may be a difference or reason for it there but I am also interested to see what parameters everyone else is using and to compare. My next steps will be to swap this motor over to MG2 output (and the lexus MGR to MG1) just to confirm that isnt the cause, and also do some higher speed plots. I suspect at higher speeds/frequency the integral gain will have less of an impact so it doesn't matter as much.

Bigpie wrote: ↑Thu Jul 16, 2020 3:52 pm

bobby_come_lately wrote: ↑Fri Jul 17, 2020 5:38 am

Thanks for that - really useful info!

Thanks. Will have a try when inverter back together. Is it the motor or generator? I found the syncofs was different on each, but I could be wrong.