Improved Fault-Tolerant Control for Brushless Permanent Magnet Motor Drives With Defective Hall Sensors

• Published in: IEEE transactions on energy conversion Vol. 31; no. 2; pp. 789 - 799
• Main Authors: Dong, Lianghui, Huang, Yingwei, Jatskevich, Juri, Liu, Jinglin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.06.2016
• Subjects: Acceleration; Brushless motors; Brushless permanent magnet (BLPM) motor; Fault diagnosis; Fault tolerance; fault tolerant control; Faults; Hall effect; Hall sensors; Magnetic sensors; Motors; Observers; Permanent magnet motors; Permanent magnets; Sensors; vector-tracking observer; vector-tracking observer; fault diagnosis; Hall sensors; Brushless permanent magnet (BLPM) motor; fault tolerant control
• ISSN: 0885-8969; 1558-0059
• DOI: 10.1109/TEC.2016.2526621

Brushless permanent magnet motor drives based on Hall sensors have received significant attention in recent years. In this area, the faults of Hall sensors become a new concern and several fault-tolerant control (FTC) methods have been proposed. However, most of the state-of-the-art FTC methods require some time to reconstruct the correct Hall sensor signals, which results in significant transient currents and speed dip during fault diagnostic process (FDP). In this paper, a new and improved FTC scheme based on FDP and vector-tracking observer is proposed. A method to identify the duration of FDP is proposed based on the analysis of acceleration estimation and the fault diagnosis results. During FDP, the method defaults to an open-loop observer control, which removes the undesirable current/torque transient. After that, the close-loop observer is re-enabled and the motor operation is restored. The proposed FTC is demonstrated in detailed simulations and experimentally on 120° brushless dc motor drives and sinusoidal PM motor drives. For both types of drives, a significant improvement is achieved in steady state and transient operation with faults of up to two Hall sensors, which has not been possible with available alternative FTC approaches (unless a sensorless control is used).