Indirect Vector Control of Induction Motor Drive Without Current Sensors for Electric- Drive Propulsion System

This paper provides the indirect vector control of an Induction Motor (IM) for an electric drive propulsion system without using the current sensors. When current sensors fail in a vector-controlled drive in an Electric Vehicle (EV), current sensorless vector control can be used as a fault-tolerant method to run the drive motor as vector control. Stator voltage and rotor flux are used to estimate currents in the two-phase stationary reference frame. For electric-drive vehicle emulation, a test bench structure is used by considering all of the forces acting on the vehicle and inertia effects on the drive motor due to the vehicle inertia. To test the effectiveness of the current sensorless induction motor drive for EV, a simulation is conducted on MATLAB/Simulink test bench model with a predetermined driving cycle (ECE R15) with current sensors and without current sensors. Simulation results are shown to support the effectiveness of the current sensorless induction motor drive in a test bench structure with low ripple magnitude in torque, flux and less THD from stator currents as compared to with current sensor control.