Super-twisting sliding mode control of torque and flux in permanent magnet synchronous machine drives

This paper investigates a permanent magnet synchronous motor drive controlled by a second-order variable structure control technique, known as the super-twisting sliding modes (STSM) control. The STSM controller is designed as a direct torque and flux controller and it works in the stator flux reference frame, rather than the rotor frame, as a regular vector control scheme. Another second-order sliding mode controller (SMC) was developed and compared with the STSM controller. Also for comparison, a similar direct torque control scheme based on linear PI controllers was developed and tested. The tests show that the STSM controller displays very robust behavior, like any SMC, and it works without notable chattering, like the linear PI-based controller. The paper presents theoretical aspects for the STSM control, several design and implementation details, and comparative experimental results with all three schemes.