An Active Flux Estimation in the Estimated Reference Frame for Sensorless Control of IPMSM

Active flux model of permanent magnet synchronous motors simplifies the model and eases sensorless control implementation. However, incorporating the current model (CM) that depends on the estimated electrical position for active flux estimation may cause performance degradation. The conventional active flux observer analysis revealed that position error influences sensorless control performance, especially during transient conditions. Thus, two improvement strategies named method-1 and method-2 are proposed in this article. Method-1 is based on an adaptive gain observer-based approach designed to discard the effect of position error. The observer gains are dependent on the estimated reference frame currents, which leads to the observer complexity. Method-2, on the other hand, uses the position error from the estimated active flux to obtain the true CM active flux without changing the conventional observer gains. Thus, the effect of position error on active flux estimation is discarded. Method-1 and method-2 fully decoupled the speed-position identification and the active flux observer. Meanwhile, a feedforward compensated phase-locked loop is adopted for speed-position identification. The proposed sensorless control strategies have been extensively validated using the Texas digital signal processor (TMS320F28335) and RT-LAB real-time simulator. The experimental results indicated that the proposed methods improved the sensorless control and active flux estimation performance.