Assessment of Master-Slave and Droop Control Strategies in Multi-Three-Phase Drives

Multi-phase electric drives can be employed in a great variety of applications. Their advantage in terms of fault-tolerance capability is becoming the focus of the work of many research activities, especially in the field of transportation electrification. The main topic is to create redundant and modular multi-three-phase drives to increase the overall system reliability and fault-tolerance. To this aim, distributed control architectures have been assessed. In this paper, a centralized master-slave control is compared against a distributed droop control architecture, in order to identify advantages and drawbacks. Both of the control strategies are applied to a double three-phase drive. The aim of the work is to assess whether the droop control architecture can be a valid alternative to a centralized master-slave control in terms of performances, but with the additional benefit of having a proper full redundant fault-tolerant application.