Investigation of Fault Diagnosis and Fault Tolerant Control in a Dual Fault Tolerant Brushless PMAC Motor Drive

Fault-tolerant motor drives are required in various safety critical applications. This paper considers a dual fault tolerant brushless permanent magnet AC (PMAC) motor drive system on a common shaft to introduce redundancy. The fault detection and diagnosis method for potential electrical faults is studied by combining the inverter driver circuits and software algorithm. The average output torque will be reduced due to various faults, therefore the fault tolerant control strategy is proposed to compensate the torque loss. The experimental setup is developed and experimental results are provided to verify the fault diagnosis method and fault control strategy.