Analysis of Rotor Position Detection Performance According to the Frequency of Square Waveform Voltage in the Harmonic Injection Sensorless Method through HILS

In this paper, the rotor position estimation performance of the sensorless scheme for permanent magnet synchronous motors (PMSMs) implemented through the injection of high-frequency square-wave voltage according to the frequency of the square-wave voltage is presented through HILS (Hardware In the Loop Simulation) experiments. An inverter using an IGBT device usually has a switching frequency of around 15 kHz. On the other hand, GaN devices that can be switched on and off at frequencies higher than 100 kHz have been recently developed, and research is being actively conducted to apply GaNs to a variable speed system. The purpose of this study is to conduct HILS experiments to analysis the rotor position estimation ability of the sensorless technique in cases where a high switching frequency was applied, such as GaN devices, with that of a system having a usual switching frequency, such as IGBT. In the HILS system used in this study, an inverter and motor model implemented with Simulink are located in a real-time simulator. A sensorless motor control method was implemented with an FPGA control board, which includes a PWM interrupt service routine of 100 kHz frequency and a harmonic injection and position detection algorithm. The HILS experiments show rotor position detection errors according to the various frequency of the harmonic voltage injected for estimating the rotor position with a PWM frequency of 100 kHz cases. According to the experimental results, good position estimation was possible not only when the harmonic of 10 kHz corresponding to 1/10 of the PWM frequency was injected, but also when the harmonic of 1 kHz corresponding to 1/100 of the PWM frequency was injected. The experiments suggest that position estimation errors decrease as the frequency of the harmonic voltage increases, and, based on the foregoing, it is thought that the application of a GaN device capable of realizing a high switching frequency in a variable speed drive system can be another advantage.

State-Space Approach for SPMSM Sensorless Passive Algorithm Tuning

Sensorless algorithms for Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motors (PMSM) have achieved increasing interest in the technical literature over the last few years. They can be divided into active methods and passive methods: the first inject high-frequency signals exploiting rotor anisotropy, whereas the second are based on observers. Recently, a sensorless control based on a rotor flux observer has been presented in the technical literature, which gives very accurate results in terms of rotor position estimation and robustness. In this paper, the aforementioned observer is considered and a procedure for choosing stabilizing gains of the observer is proposed. The contribution of the paper is three-fold: the mathematical modelling of the rotor flux observer, the methodology for the definition of the observer gains, and the presentation of the experimental results.