Experimental Assessment of Sliding Mode Current Control with Exponential Reaching Law for an Induction Machine Drive Fed by a Matrix Converter

Matrix Converters (MCs) are considered an exciting option in electrical motor drives for applications where size and weight are critical, for example aerospace or automotive. Several control techniques have been proposed to exploit the MC’s benefits and get the desired performance. Among them, Sliding Mode Control (SMC) is quite attractive due to its robustness and fast response. However, Chattering can appear in the SMC strategy. Consequently, the Exponential Reaching Law (ERL) is employed to solve this issue in this paper. The proposed control structure includes a modulation stage based on the space vector modulation technique and a Kalman filter-based rotor current estimator. Experimental results are provided to validate the proposed method using a custom test bench based on SiC-MOSFETs MC and a three-phase induction machine. A comparison between the proposed SMC-ERL and classic SMC is also provided to highlight the improvements obtained.