This textbook follows the treatment of electric machines and drives in my earlier textbook "Electric Drives - An Integrative Approach." I have attempted to use the same notation to provide consistency. If I am asked to list three unique features of this book, the following are foremost in my opinion:

Keeping it simple without being simplistic,

Avoiding unnecessary mathematics, and

Providing a “physical” picture as much as possible for visualization purposes.

The third item above needs elaboration. Most research literature and textbooks in this field treat dq-axis transformation of a-b-c phase quantities on a purely mathematical basis, without relating this transformation to a set of windings that could be visualized. The approach adopted in this book is different but leads to the same results - we visual a set of representative dq windings along an orthogonal set of axes and then relate their currents and voltages to the a-b-c phase quantities. This discussion follows seamlessly from the treatment of space vectors and the equivalent winding representation in steady state in the previous course.

For discussion of all topics in this course, computer simulations are a necessity. For this purpose, I have chosen Simulink® for the following reasons: a student-version that is more than sufficient for our purposes is available at a very reasonable price and it takes extremely short time to become proficient in its use. Moreover, this software simplifies the development of a real-time controller of drives in the hardware laboratory for student experimentation - such a laboratory, using 42-V (a future standard for automotive voltages) machines, is at present under development using a digital signal processor based rapid-prototyping tool.

All chapters in this book can be covered in a single-semester course. The MATLAB® and the Simulink® files used in examples are included on a cd-rom attached to this book. The reader is urged to first look at the read-me file on this cd-rom before reading this textbook.