Rapid prototyping of a sensor fault tolerant traction control system

The problem of sensor faults on an AC-drive system for an electric train is considered. Intermittent disconnections of these sensors produces severe transient errors in the estimator in the control loop if not heavily filtered to suppress these errors which will degrade performance. This paper shows that model based techniques can be applied for achieving reliable tolerance of intermittent disconnections without degrading performance. A bilinear model of the motor is used to produce a fault tolerant scheme for estimation of control variables. This paper goes beyond simulation to show how such a system can be verified in hardware. A small test-rig is built with a DSP used to run fault tolerant scheme.