Implementation Issues and Performance Evaluation of Surface-Mounted PM Machine Drives with Hall-Effect Position Sensors and a Vector-Tracking Observer

This paper presents the implementation of the Hall-effect sensor-based, vector-tracking observer and discusses its performance when used in an ac brushless drive for surface-mounted PM machines. First, the tuning of the observer is presented. Then, decoupling is used to improve the performance of the observer. Various decoupling strategies are investigated. Stability analysis is also carried out that leads to a maximum amount of position estimation error for the observer to track properly. This paper also demonstrates the benefits of harmonic decoupling with respect to position estimation and disturbance rejection. Both simulation and experimental testing are used to illustrate the performance and limits of the proposed observer topology and of the drive when this observer is used for state feedback.