An observer-based mechanical sensor failure fault tolerant controller structure in PMSM drive

This paper presents a specific controller architecture devoted to obtain a Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor drive robust to mechanical sensor failure. In order to increase the reliability which is a key issue in industrial and transportation applications (Electric or Hybrid ground vehicle or aerospace actuators) two virtual sensors (a two stage Extended Kalman Filter and a back-emf adaptive observer) and a voting algorithm are combined with the actual sensor to build a fault tolerant controller. The observers are evaluated off line with experimental data and the robustness against parameter variation is tested through simulation results. The Fault Tolerant Controller feasibility is proved through simulation of the PMSM drive.