Practical Assessment of Saliency-Tracking Feasibility for Safety-Relevant IPM Drives in Automotive Applications

Saliency-tracking is a suitable method to provide redundant rotor position information for safety-relevant IPM drives. To identify if a given IPM is suited for saliency-tracking is a non trivial task. Easy applicable methods are presented to identify the feasibility of a given IPM for saliency-tracking, that do not require a sophisticated self-sensing control structure. The impacts of different effects on saliency-tracking are explained. The presented identification methods are applied to two different IPM designs. The results are discussed in context of saliency-tracking feasibility. Saliency-tracking based self-sensing is used to verify the results.