This paper presents a safe charging operation for the integrated on-board electric vehicle (EV) charging system, where the power electronic components are reconfigured from the propulsive system. First, the rotational movement is detected and analyzed, when the motor windings are reutilized as the DC/DC inductors. Then, the safe charging operation is investigated, which is based on the analysis of the charging torque and the ripple currents. Moreover, a new control strategy is presented with the purpose of the safe operation and smoothing reactor during the EV charging process. Finally, both simulation and experimentation are carried out to verify the safe charging operation. The results prove the feasibility and validity of the proposed safe charging operation for on-board charger with the three-phase interior permanent-magnet (IPM) motor.

Multiphase flux-switching permanent-magnet (FSPM) motor drives are nowadays considered for various applications due to numerous advantages when compared with their three-phase counterparts. In principle, stator-flux-oriented control of a nine-phase flux-switching permanent-magnet (FSPM) (9P-FSPM) motor can be realized theoretically by using four pairs of synchronous current controllers in conjunction with eight conventional proportional-integrals (PIs), for alleviation of the coupling effects and unwanted low-order stator current harmonics. In practice, however, drive performance will deteriorate if the PI-based current controller is not well tuned for optimum response to every dynamic scenario due to nonlinearity. In order to enhance dynamic performance of the drive system, a fully-decoupled model predictive control algorithm with fixed switching frequency is developed for the 9P-FSPM motor. The main contribution is comprehensive and detailed description of precise modeling of the 9P-FSPM motor and the controller design process. Also, some practical hints are given for implementation, such as the elimination of low-order harmonic currents and the selection of active voltage vector in the nine-phase drive system. Both simulation and experimental results are presented to validate the effectiveness of the developed current controller and the high dynamic performance of the 9P-FSPM motor drive.

This paper proposes an effective charging-torque elimination method for six-phase integrated on-board electric vehicle (EV) chargers. The integrated EV charger is derived from the power inverter, motor windings, sensors and microchips, which can significantly reduce the system cost and volume. In fact, the charging electromagnetic torque is inevitable to produce, since the alternating currents flow through the motor windings. This is due to the motor windings serving as the filtering inductors of the rectifier for the on-board charger. In order to keep the vehicle standstill during the charging process, a universal expression of charging torque is derived and analyzed, which is according to magnetic co-energy approach. All possible charging torque elimination positions are presented with a numerical method. Moreover, the unity power factor and zero sequence current control are executed during the EV charging process. Finally, the proposed charging torque elimination method is verified by both simulation and experimentation. The results prove the validity of the proposed charging-torque elimination method for six-phase permanent magnet synchronous machine (PMSM).

To reduce the thrust force ripple of a complementary and modular linear flux-switching permanent magnet machine, a model predictive thrust force control (MPTFC) is developed and implemented based on the active voltage vectors selection (AVVS) and two-voltage-vector synthesis (TVVS). Firstly, the active VVs are screened and assigned to the specific sector, instead of traversing all the possible vectors, and consequently, significantly decrease prediction workload. Secondly, for the elimination of the weighting factor in the conventional MPTFC, the control object is transformed from the thrust force and stator flux to the stator flux only by using the load angle. Thirdly, to achieve the steady-state performance improvement, the TVVS approach is applied in each control period, where the optimal TVVS and its dwell time are simultaneously obtained by only one cost function. Both simulated and experimental results verify that the steady-state performance improvement can be realized by the developed MPTFC through comparing with normal hysteresis current control and conventional MPTFC strategies.

Parameter mismatches in conventional model predictive current control (MPCC) would worsen torque and THD performance. To eliminate the parameter dependence of MPCC, this letter proposes a model-free predictive current control (MFPCC) for a three-level inverter-fed interior permanent magnet synchronous motor (IPMSM). Firstly, to increase the current difference updating frequency in the diode neutral-point-clamped (NPC) three-level inverter, a synchronous updating method is proposed in a manner where the number of updated current differences during one sampling period is increased up to 6. Secondly, for the sake of computational burden alleviation, a candidate vector selection algorithm is introduced in such a way that the number of candidate vectors is reduced to only 7–9. Then, the problem of neutral-point voltage fluctuation which is inherent to the three-level NPC inverter is investigated, and a reasonable replacement method incorporating the redundancy characteristic of small vectors is developed. Finally, experimental results verify that the system robustness against mismatched parameters can be greatly enhanced by use of the proposed control scheme; meanwhile, steady-state performance and dynamic-state response of the system can be improved to some extent as well.

Model predictive control (MPC) has attracted a lot of attention for power converters and motor drives in the last decade, owing to its merits such as explicit concept, excellent dynamic performance, and decent applicability in digital implementation. However, as a model-based method, classical MPC is heavily dependent on the system parameters of the plant under control. In this article, a novel finite-set sliding-mode model-free predictive current control (FS-SM-MFPCC) is proposed for permanent magnet synchronous machine (PMSM) drives, which combines the theory of sliding-mode control with MPC. The proposed strategy is thoroughly model-free, irrelevant for the dc-link voltage, and computationally light. The original version of the suggested strategy suffers from two flaws: 1) poor steady-state performance and 2) existent tracking errors, which are solved by using a simple correction algorithm and an extended control set coordinating with an improved cost function, respectively. The comparatively experimental results based on a 500-W PMSM drive are given to confirm the benefits of the proposed strategy.