Improved Model Predictive Current Control for SPMSM Drives With Parameter Mismatch

Model predictive current control (MPCC) can predict future motor behavior according to a motor model. In practice, however, motor parameters will vary at run time, and the parameter mismatch disturbances caused by the variation in motor parameters will deteriorate the MPCC performance. To suppress the parameter mismatch disturbances effectively, this paper proposes a modified MPCC with a current variation update mechanism. In contrast with the traditional current prediction equation that contains crude model parameters, the modified current prediction equation contains only measured information, taking advantage of the proposed current variation update mechanism, which can update the modified prediction equation within each sampling period. A simulation established by MATLAB software indicates that the proposed method can effectively suppress the parameter mismatch disturbances. Experiments are carried out to verify the correctness of the proposed method

An Improved Model Free Predictive Current Control for PMSM with Current Prediction Error Variations

Funding Agency: Key Areas of Guangdong Province through the Project “Integration and Industrialization of High Performance, Long Endurance, and Integrated Electric Drive System” (Grant Number: 2019B090910001)Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Improved Deadbeat Predictive Current Control of Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor Using a Novel Stator Current and Disturbance Observer

Thanks to the merits of superior dynamic response capability and current tracking performance, the deadbeat predictive current control (DPCC) has become a research hotspot for the permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) drive system. However, DPCC is a model parameter sensitive control method. If there is a motor parameter mismatch, the performance of the DPCC drive system in terms of expected voltage vector, current harmonics, and torque ripple would be influenced. In this paper, firstly, a novel power sliding mode reaching law is proposed, which shortens the convergence time of the system state no matter what the initial state is. Then, an improved non-homogeneous disturbance observer (NHDO) with the proposed power sliding mode reaching law is established, which guarantees d-q axis current errors converge to zero when the PMSM drive system suffers uncertain disturbances, such as motor parameter mismatch. Finally, an improved DPCC using the novel stator current and disturbance observer, which includes the proposed power sliding mode reaching law and NHDO, is established. Hence the accuracy of the predicted current increases significantly, and voltage vectors can be immediately compensated once disturbances occur. Both simulation and platform experiments verify that the improved DPCC can maintain the current tracking performance with lower current ripples than the traditional DPCC when the major motor parameters mismatch. The proposed novel stator current and disturbance observer may also enhance the PMSM's drive performance under other control strategies

A New Position and Speed Estimation Scheme for Position Control of PMSM Drives Using Low-Resolution Position Sensors

A new position control method for permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) drive with a low-resolution encoder is proposed in this paper. Three binary Hall position sensors are utilized to realize a moderate-performance position control system for the consideration of economy and simplicity in servo application. Compared with sensorless control, the usage of binary Hall position sensors is a guarantee of both control performance and low cost. However, the low resolution of the Hall sensor will heavily deteriorate the accuracy of the position and speed calculation. Such drawback can be effectively minimized by using appropriate position and speed estimation schemes. With the help of polynomial fitting and state observer techniques, a solution is provided to realize semi-closed loop control by treating the position and speed estimators as separate systems. The performance can be improved (1) by proposing a polynomial fitting scheme with least squares method, high-resolution rotor-position predictor can be derived by fitting the predefined position data from binary Hall position sensors in a linear or quadratic manner; (2) by adopting the dual-sampling-rate observer, instantaneous speed can be estimated at each control cycle and the estimation error is corrected once a new measurement form the Hall arrives. Furthermore, a nonlinear position control algorithm is introduced to increase standstill stability. Extensive experimental results are given to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method and its superiority over conventional methods

Sensorless control for limp-home mode of EV applications

PhD ThesisOver the past decade research into electric vehicles’ (EVs) safety, reliability and availability has become a hot topic and has attracted a lot of attention in the literature. Inevitably these key areas require further study and improvement. One of the challenges EVs face is speed/position sensor failure due to vibration and harsh environments. Wires connecting the sensor to the motor controller have a high likelihood of breakage. Loss of signals from the speed/position sensor will bring the EV to halt mode. Speed sensor failure at a busy roundabout or on a high speed motorway can have serious consequences and put the lives of drivers and passengers in great danger. This thesis aims to tackle the aforementioned issues by proposing several novel sensorless schemes based on Model Reference Adaptive Systems (MRAS) suitable for limp-home mode of EV applications. The estimated speed from these schemes is used for the rotor flux position estimation. The estimated rotor flux position is employed for sensorless torque-controlled drive (TCD) based on indirect rotor field oriented control (IRFOC). The capabilities of the proposed schemes have been evaluated and compared to the conventional back-Electromotive Force MRAS (back-EMF MRAS) scheme using simulation environment and a test bench setup. The new schemes have also been tested on electric golf buggies. The results presented for the proposed schemes show that utilising these schemes provide a reliable and smooth sensorless operation during vehicle test-drive starting from standstill and over a wide range of speeds, including the field weakening region. Employing these new schemes for sensorless TCD in limp-home mode of EV applications increases safety, reliability and availability of EVs

RECENT TECHNIQUES ON OBSERVER DESIGN FOR DISTURBANCE ESTIMATION AND REJECTION IN PERMANENT MAGNET SYNCHRONOUS MOTORS

Permanent magnet synchronous machines (PMSMs) (either motor or generator) have attracted attention of research community comparing to other types of AC machines in the recent two decades. PMSMs are preferable than other AC machines in terms of large power-factor, broad speed of operation, compact proportions, and effective operation. Unfortunately, different sources of nonlinearities, model uncertainties, and external perturbations determine severity in a design of accurate speed control scheme for PMSMs. In the era of developing science and technologies, many advanced control solutions are proposed to control PMSMs. Although new solutions show their advantages comparing to traditional methods in terms of performance evaluation, practical realization of those algorithms could require expensive hardware with high computational capabilities. Furthermore, people in industry with less knowledge about the motor control may experience difficulties in using such advanced controllers on their own. Traditional PI/PID control schemes still work as a major control technique in modern industry, and in motor control as well. Numerous positive facts about the PI/PID schemes make such superiority of these control schemes. Firstly, the PI/PID can be implemented easily on most industrial software and hardware components. Secondly, while its scheme has clear mechanism of operation, most industrial processes could be controlled via the PI/PID scheme. These schemes are good in terms of small number of parameters to tune and tuning process itself could be very straightforward. Finally, implementation of the PI/PID controllers would require smaller time comparing to most proposed complex control solutions. It is studied that the traditional PI/PID controllers usually cannot deal with unpredictable disturbances, which in turn leads to degraded performance of an overall control system. Inspired by the advantages and widespread application of PI/PID control structure in industry, we propose a disturbance observer based composite control scheme which uses the PI-like controller for the feedback regulation and disturbance observer for estimation of lumped disturbances presented in a PMSM control system. Under this circumstance, this thesis work proposes three different control solutions for PMSM such as High-order disturbance observer-based composite control (HDOBCC), Disturbance rejection PI (DR-PI) control, and Hierarchical optimal disturbance observer-based control (HODOBC). Furthermore, to deeply understand the similarity and difference between the traditional disturbance observer-based control (DOBC) and active-disturbance rejection control (ADRC) schemes, this thesis also presents results of unification of these two control approaches in the speed control of a PMSM. The HDOBCC as the first method proposed in this thesis is designed to improve reference speed tracking performance of a PMSM under various operational conditions. A structure of the HDOBCC comprises a fuzzy-PI controller in a feedback stabilization part and novel high-order disturbance observer in a feedforward compensation part of the speed control system. The proposed controller is designed based on the research questions such as: firstly, although a fixed gain traditional PI controller is able to present satisfactory performance at some extent, still it does not guarantee such performance when sudden disturbances occur in a system; secondly, many disturbance observers designed for a PMSM in literature consider only a load torque as a disturbance, neglecting model uncertainties and parameter variations in design stage. Therefore, the HDOBCC is proposed such that it utilizes a fuzzy approach to determine parameters of the PI controller to overcome limitations of the fixed gain PI controller. Furthermore, the proposed scheme includes a high-order disturbance observer, which estimates not only the load torque, but also disturbances due to model uncertainties and parameter variations. Moreover, extended simulation and experimental studies are conducted to affirm performance of the HDOBCC under various form of the load torque. In addition to commonly tested step form of a load torque, severe forms of the load torque such as triangular form and sinusoidal form are tested with the proposed controller. Stability analysis of the closed-loop HDOBCC system is further provided. The next proposed method, DR-PI control, is designed by seeking answer for questions such as: firstly, although the traditional DOBC scheme applied for PMSM shows reasonable results in a PMSM control, its design can be limited to known actual parameters of the PMSM. In practice, actual parameters are usually not available, hence it could be hard to design the traditional DOBC in the absence of a plant information; secondly, for tuning a PI controller the traditional Ziegler-Nichols tuning approach still remains as one of the popular tuning approaches, however it does not give a rigorous explanation on selection of parameters during its design. Consequently, to answer these questions, the DR-PI control is designed for the PMSM speed control. The DR-PI control is designed such that it has a simple PI-like structure with intrinsic disturbance rejection mechanism determined by the parameters of a filtering element, desired plant model, and desired closed-loop system. Simulation and experimental validations are provided to validate the performance of the DR-PI. Furthermore, gain tuning mechanism and stability analysis of the closed-loop DR-PI-based speed control are also presented. The HODOBC scheme as a third proposed control scheme targets on the next research questions as: first, parameters of the traditional PI controller are mostly obtained by trial-and-error approach, which in turn may not guarantee satisfactory results; in a cascaded PMSM control, the outer speed loop performance highly depends on the performance of the inner current loop. The well-tuned speed control loop may degrade in performance, if the inner current loop is not tuned properly. To address these questions, we propose the HODOBC scheme, which consists of optimal PIlike controller in the feedback stabilization part and optimal extended-state observer (ESO) in the disturbance compensation part. The proposed HODOBC showed better performance when it is compared with other traditional controllers via experiments. Stability analysis is provided via the root locus approach. The study on unification of the DOBC and ADRC schemes has the following research question: the DOBC and ADRC are both used in estimation of total disturbance, but these two schemes are considered differently in literature. Hence, the study of both scheme is conducted to show the condition at which these two schemes show identical performance. The analysis of the traditional DOBC and ADRC schemes concludes that both scheme are equivalent in terms of performance characteristics if the dynamical delays of disturbance observers in each scheme are same. The results of analysis reveal that both scheme can be utilized to design a robust control system for PMSM, i.e. once the gains of disturbance observers can be calculated under the DOBC framework, further the disturbance rejection mechanism can be achieved via the ADRC framework. The results of PMSM control with the proposed control schemes have been tested on the Lucas-Nuelle DSP-based experimental setup

Sensorless Control of im for Limp-Home Mode EV Applications

This paper presents a novel speed estimation scheme for induction motors (IMs) based on back electromotive-force model reference adaptive system (back-EMF MRAS). The scheme is employed for the purpose of sensorless fault-Tolerant torque-controlled drives used in a limp-home mode operation in electric vehicle (EV) applications. The proposed scheme was experimentally tested on a laboratory dynamometer using a 19-kW IM and a 29-kW controller, which are both currently used in the automotive industry for EV applications. The scheme was also implemented on an electric golf buggy which was equipped with a 5-kW IM. A performance comparison was carried out between the proposed and conventional back-EMF MRAS schemes for starting from standstill, sensitivity to parameter variations and constant speed operation with load variations. Utilizing the golf buggy, the behaviors of the new scheme was separately investigated for vehicle starting from standstill, wide speed range including field weakening region, and hill-starting operations. The proposed scheme is computationally easy to implement, robust against sensitivity to parameters variations, inverter nonlinearity and errors due to digitization in the field weakening region. This scheme is not only consistent for vehicle starting from standstill, it also provides a reliable vehicle-drive in the field weakening region and during vehicle hill-starting. The dynamometer and vehicle test-drive results show the suitability of the proposed scheme for the purpose of EV fault-Tolerant limp-home mode operation

Model-Free Predictive Control of Motor Drives and Power Converters:A Review

Predictive control has emerged as a promising control method in a variety of technological fields. Model predictive control, as one of the subdivisions of this control method, has found a growing number of applications in power electronics and motor drives. In practical implementations, model predictive control faces performance degradation of the controlled plant due to its dependency on a model. There are considerable numbers of review papers that are devoted to the different points of view of predictive control. However, the existing literature lacks a review study that addresses the solutions for parameter dependency of the model predictive control method. Recently, model-free predictive control has been used in drives and power electronics as a solution for dealing with the model-dependency of the model predictive control method. There are many papers that have used such methods. In this paper, a classification is proposed for the different implementation types of model-free predictive control or similar methods that address model parameter uncertainties. Additionally, a comparison between the methods is also presented

Discrete-Time Current Control of Synchronous Motor Drives

The aim of this thesis is to analyze discrete-time models and current control of synchronous motors with a magnetically anisotropic rotor structure, such as interior permanent-magnet synchronous motors (IPMSMs) and synchronous reluctance motors (SyRMs). Current regulators in most modern electrical drives are implemented in digital processors. Discretization of continuous-time controllers using the Euler and Tustin approximations, also known as the emulation-based design, is the most common approach. This design gives satisfactory results when the ratio between the sampling and fundamental frequencies remains high. The performance of the emulation-based design deteriorates as the frequency ratio becomes small. For this reason, the controller based on the exact discrete-time model of the machine is preferred. If the exact expressions are computationally too demanding, approximate expressions (series expansions) could be used instead. A hold equivalent discrete-time model with the effects of the zero-order hold (ZOH) and a sampler is studied in both the stator and rotor coordinates. A two-degrees-of-freedom (2DOF) state-space controller is used with the gains based on the exact discrete-time model of the motor. The results are compared with the emulation- and series expansions (of the exact discrete-time model) based controllers. The robustness of these methods against parameter errors is analyzed and the current controllers are also investigated by performing simulations and experiments on a 6.7-kW SyRM drive