Concept and Implementation of Embedded Magnetic Encoder in Flux-Switching Permanent-Magnet Machines.

Rotor angle is essential in permanent-magnet (PM) brushless machines. Recently, an embedded magnetic encoder (EME) scheme, consisted of linear Hall sensors installing inside of the PM machines, has been proposed to sense the flux density and consequently provides rotor position. Compared with traditional optical encoder and resolver, the linear Hall sensor prevails over in both space and cost. The aforementioned scheme is employed successfully in rotor-PM machines, where a PM-excited field rotates at the synchronous speed. In this article, the feasibility of EME in stator-PM flux-switching machine is validated, where PMs are located in stator, resulting in a stationary PM field. The stator slots are selected as installation position of linear Hall sensors to avoid changing the existing structure of machines. The variation of linear Hall signal is due to the changing reluctance of rotor rather than rotating PMs. Then, a decoding algorithm is designed based on an add-up operation, a complex coefficient filter, and a synchronous reference frame phase-locked loop. Finally, experiments on a prototype machine are conducted to validate the effectiveness of EME scheme under both speed-varying and load-varying conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]