An approach to compare multiphase drives for automotive safety applications

Automotive safety applications will be soon a standard based on market evolution trends. Actuators performing safety operations, such as steering or braking, need to be more reliable with a low manufacturing cost. Multiphase drives seem to be a good alternative to actuators redundancy, as it offers greater degrees of freedom with at a limited extra cost. These drives have been studied for a while, especially in other industries such as ship propulsion or aeronautic actuator. However, comparison between multiphase drives for a given application is rare. In this paper, a methodology is proposed to evaluate several drives for a safety automotive application. Some manufacturing assumptions have been made in order to narrow the study to five, six and seven phase permanent magnet synchronous motors (PMSM). Machines have been modeled using 2-D finite elements analysis (FEA) software in order to extract their parameters which will be used in dynamic simulations. Based on the obtained results, each drive is evaluated according to defined criteria and best solutions are highlighted. Considering a low voltage high current application, full bridge inverter topologies feeding a six-phase motor seem to be a promising solution.