Freewheeling Current-Based Sensorless Field-Oriented Control of Five-Phase Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motors Under Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor Failures of a Single Phase.

Model-based sensorless field-oriented control (FOC) suffers from overparameterization and can be laborious to use for a five-phase permanent magnet synchronous motor. On the other hand, insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) frequently fails in an electric drive. Under IGBT failure, a freewheeling current is observed, and, above all, it carries the failed phase back electromotive force information. Based on this observation, this article presents the design of a brand new sensorless FOC by exploiting the freewheeling current to accommodate both IGBT and position sensor failures, which is expected to further enhance the drive's fault-tolerant capability. The mathematical model of this current is first established to provide a theoretical basis and a comprehensive understanding of the presented sensorless FOC. By virtue of this model, a second-order generalized integrator with a frequency-locked loop can be used as a simple and elegant way to extract position/speed estimates. Experimental results are provided to validate the proposed sensorless FOC philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]