A novel design of rotor position estimator for sensorless control of SPMSM operating at medium and high speeds

This paper presents a novel design of rotor position estimator for sensorless control of surface-mounted permanent magnet synchronous motor (SPMSM) operating at medium and high speeds. Model reference adaptive scheme (MRAS) is employed to estimate the machine back-emf signals, from which the rotor position information can be extracted. To avoid the main drawback of the conventional MRAS based estimator design which is lengthy parameter tuning, a new reference model and new estimation laws are proposed. Compared with the conventional design, the advantages of the proposed new estimator design lie in the following aspects: (1) the reference model is simpler in computing; (2) there is only one estimator parameter to be determined and can be chosen systematically according to motor operating speed; (3) the position estimation accuracy is improved by introducing a phase compensation term in the estimation algorithm. The effectiveness of the proposed estimator is verified through simulations and experimental testings.