Sensorless position estimation in a fault tolerant motor drive with redundancy

Abstract

This paper proposes a sensorless position estimation scheme suitable for a fault tolerant permanent magnet (PM) AC motor drive with redundancy. The proposed fault tolerant motor has an electrically and magnetically isolated configuration to improve reliability and fault tolerance. The method utilises the instantaneous currents and voltages of the windings, and a mathematical model of the motor drives to estimate the rotor position. Simulation results are shown to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed estimation method. © Institution of Engineers.