Reliability is a fundamental requirement in aircraft safety-critical equipments. Its pursuing involves the adoption of protective design concepts such as fault-tolerant or redundant approaches, aiming to minimize mission failure probabilities. Multi-phase motor drives are gaining a growing interest to this extent, because they permit a boost in torque and power density, allowing the design of very compact high efficiency drives with intrinsic fault-tolerant capabilities. This paper presents a five-phase permanent magnet brushless motor drive developed for an aircraft flap actuator application. The motor is designed to satisfy the load specifications with one or two phases open or with a phase short circuited, while a failure in the rotor position sensors is remedied through a sensorless strategy. Design studies aiming to predict the faulty mode performance in case of different remedial strategies are presented. Experimental tests on the drive prototype are included, which confirm its capability to satisfy the planned degraded modes of operation.

This paper deals with the flux-weakening control of surface-mounted permanent-magnet synchronous motors, taking into account the influence of the resistive voltage drop in the stator windings, whose effect is usually neglected in similar studies. First, the motor equations exploiting the optimal torque-speed limits in the flux-weakening region are evaluated and discussed. Then, the influence of the resistive voltage drop is pointed out, highlighting its effect on the setup of the flux-weakening strategy. Hence, a simplified approach to flux-weakening motor control is presented, useful for the practical implementation in microcontrolled drives. Finally, experimental results are shown, using a position tracking application as a test case.

This paper presents an adaptive sliding-mode observer for the speed-sensorless field-oriented control of induction motors. The observer detects the rotor flux components in the two-phase stationary reference frame by the motor electrical equations. The motor speed is estimated by an additional relation obtained by a Lyapunov function. The analytical development of the sliding observer and the speed estimation algorithm is fully explained. Experimental results are presented, based on a TMS320F240 digital signal processor controller implementation. The system performance with different observer gains and the influence of the motor parameters deviations are shown and discusse

In this paper, a sensorless controller for an interior permanent-magnet synchronous motor is presented based on well-known high-frequency signal injection techniques. The issue of the demodulation process is the key point of this paper. A novel approach based on discrete Fourier transform and nonconventional reference frame transformation is presented, allowing a simple and robust noncoherent demodulation, i.e., in which no information about the carrier phase is needed. In the classically adopted coherent approaches, in fact, uncertainty about carrier phase reflects in uncertainty in the demodulated signal amplitude, affecting observer gains and signal-to-noise ratio and definitively providing a degradation of the performance of the estimator. Analytical development of the sensorless algorithm, including the demodulation technique, is provided. A complete investigation by simulation is carried out aiming at showing the performance of the proposed method. Finally, experimental results are presented based on a prototype motor drive for city scooters.

Precise motion control requires high-accuracy and high- bandwidth feedback speed information, often calculated by direct measurement of the rotor position available through the incremental encoder equipping the drive. The resolution of the encoder heavily affects the cost of the drive and the accuracy and bandwidth of the calculated speed. The limitations introduced by a low resolution encoder can be partially reduced by a proper speed calculation (or estimation) algorithm, that therefore plays a key role in modern drive systems. In this paper a comparative analysis of state-of-art speed measurement and estimation algorithms suitable for low-resolution incremental encoder equipped drives is presented, aiming at highlighting the specific feature of each one, both from the performance point of view, and from the computational requirements needed for actual implementation. The paper proposes itself as a guide for engineers in the complex choice of the best solution for each application.