Adaptive Nonlinear Control of Salient-Pole PMSM for Hybrid Electric Vehicle Applications: Theory and Experiments

This research work deals with the problem of controlling a salient-pole permanent-magnet synchronous motor (SP-PMSM) used in hybrid electric vehicles. An adaptive nonlinear controller based on the backstepping technique is developed to meet the following requirements: control of the reference vehicle speed in the presence of load variation and changes in the internal motor parameters while keeping the reliability and stability of the vehicle. The complexity of the control problem lies on the system nonlinearity, instability and the problem of inaccessibility to measure all the internal parameters, such as inertia, friction and load variation. For this issue, an adaptive backstepping regulator is developed to estimate these parameters. On the basis of formal analysis and simulation, as well as test results, it is clearly shown that the designed controller achieves all the goals, namely robustness and reliability of the controller, stability of the system and speed control, considering the uncertainty parameters' measurements.