Finite Set Sensorless Control With Minimum a Priori Knowledge and Tuning Effort for Interior Permanent-Magnet Synchronous Motors

By applying rotor angle sensorless control methods, the costs of the electrical drive can be decreased while its reliability is increased. Traditionally, the design of both the rotor angle estimator and the drive controller require a detailed motor model and manual tuning leading to significant effort by human experts. In this article, a rotor anisotropy-based sensorless control scheme for interior permanent-magnet synchronous motors is proposed that enables sensorless control with minimum tuning effort and a priori motor knowledge. Due to these characteristics, the scheme is particularly suitable for self-commissioning or low-cost drive applications. The scheme contains a finite control set model predictive current controller (FCS-MPCC) with an additional inequality constraint that enables the identification of the motor model in the stator-fixed coordinate system by using the last three measurement samples. Utilizing an automatic system identification procedure, the motor model is determined online in a data-driven fashion. The identified motor model serves both as prediction model of the FCS-MPCC and as baseline for the rotor angle estimation via an eigenvalue decomposition approach. Challenging experimental investigations at standstill up to the medium speed range prove the applicability of the proposed approach. Here, highly dynamic speed and current transients can be handled by the proposed method.