Intelligent Nonlinear Sensorless Predictive Field Oriented Control of PMSM Drive for Three Wheeler Hybrid Solar PV-Battery Electric Vehicle

This paper explores a hybrid solar photovoltaic (PV)-battery based electric auto-rickshaw driven by a permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) drive with sensorless control. The widely used PMSM drive employs standard field oriented control for electric vehicle (EV) applications. However, the PI controllers used for the speed control and current control loops, have various shortcomings with the dynamic driving conditions demanding high performance controllers. This paper aims to eliminate the PI controllers by using fuzzy logic based speed controller and model predictive current controller. Further, the cost reduction is achieved through position sensorless control using the active flux observer based position and noiseless speed estimation. This combined package of nonlinear controllers, enhances the starting, steady state and dynamic performance of the sensorless drive. Maximum power is extracted from the solar PV array using perturb and observe (P&O) algorithm. Along with the feasibility study for Indian scenario, the performance of the proposed drive system is simulated using MATLAB Simulink and presented in the paper.