Sensorless position estimation in a fault tolerant motor drive with redundancy

Abstract

This paper proposes a sensorless position estimation scheme suitable for the fault tolerant permanent magnet (PM) AC motor drives with redundancy. The proposed fault tolerant motor has an electrically and magnetically isolated configuration to improve reliability and fault tolerance in the motor drives. The developed indirect position estimation method utilizes the instantaneous currents and voltages of the windings and the mathematical model of the motor drives to produce the rotor position data. In this paper, various simulation results are shown to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed estimation method.