The present invention concerns a method and a device for determining a position of a rotor of a three-phase motor using a FOC system. The invention: —determines, by a proportional-integral controller, a first control voltage vector at a first instant, —transforms the first control voltage vector using an inverse Park transform, —sums the transformed first control voltage vector to a regular polygonal voltage pattern applied during a given duration, —performs a PWM from the sum of the transformed first control voltage vector and the regular polygonal voltage pattern, —controls the motor with the pulse-width modulation, —measures the current at each phase of the motor, —estimates the position of the rotor from the measured currents and from the regular polygonal voltage pattern, —determines, at a second instant, a second control voltage vector from the measured currents and from the estimated position.

A method for determining a saturation characteristic of a synchronous reluctance machine includes applying with a pulse inverter a voltage sequence to a stator of the synchronous reluctance machine, wherein the voltage sequence introduces stator fluxes and is applied such that torques acting on a rotor of the synchronous reluctance machine cancel each other out during the application of the voltage sequence. Electrical currents resulting from the stator fluxes are measured and the saturation characteristic is determined based on the stator fluxes and the measured electrical currents.

A method of controlling a multi-phase electric machine includes implementing a first control method to control the operation of a six-phase machine that is configured as a combination of two three-phase machines. The method also includes determining whether a fault exists in the six-phase machine. In response to determining that the fault exists in the six-phase machine, the method includes implementing a second and different control method to control the operation of the six-phase machine.

A motor driving apparatus of driving a motor including a plurality of windings respectively corresponding to a plurality of phases is disclosed The motor driving apparatus includes a first inverter including a plurality of first switching elements and connected to a first end of each of the windings, a second inverter including a plurality of second switching elements and connected to a second end of each of the windings, and a controller connected to the first switching elements and the second switching elements and configured to determine an effective vector closest to a voltage vector corresponding to a preset voltage command of the motor as a duty of the plurality of second switching elements and to control pulse width modulation of the first switching elements using a value obtained by adding the effective vector corresponding to the duty of the second switching elements to the voltage command of the motor as a voltage command of the first inverter.

A speed estimating device for an AC motor includes: a model deviation computing unit computing a model deviation based on a voltage, a current, and an estimated angular velocity of the AC motor; a first angular velocity estimating unit computing a first estimated angular velocity based on the model deviation; a second angular velocity estimating unit computing a second estimated angular velocity differing from the first estimated angular velocity in frequency, based on the model deviation; a compensation phase computing unit computing a compensation phase based on a disturbance frequency; and an estimated angular velocity calculator computing an estimated angular velocity of the AC motor based on the first estimated angular velocity and the second estimated angular velocity. Either one of the first estimated angular velocity and the second estimated angular velocity is computed based on the compensation phase.

Systems and methods for extracting motor operational state parameters from an electric motor for improved motor control and motor fault or failure detection are discussed. An exemplary system includes an excitation circuit to apply a drive voltage to an electric motor, and a processor circuit to measure a resulting winding current, extract a current waveform by oversampling the winding current in an entire PWM frame at a sampling rate higher than the PWM frequency, and fit the current waveform in the PWM period to a parametric model. The processor circuit can determine a motor operational state parameter using one or more of the applied drive voltage or the parametric model of the winding current.

The invention discloses a control method for balancing scaling errors of multiple current sensors for PMSM. An impedance network is set between a direct current power supply and a three-phase inverter connected to a PMSM to avoid positive and negative poles of the direct current power supply being short-circuited under actions of shoot-through vectors. Under actions of two shoot-through vectors in a PWM cycle, three-phase current sensors are used to respectively sample the sum of currents in each branch of three-phase output branches of the three-phase inverter and a branch of the same bridge arm of the three-phase inverter, according to the sampled currents, operating to obtain the relationship between the scaling error coefficients of the three-phase current sensors. Then, correction coefficients are calculated. The correction of the scaling errors of the current sensors is implemented using correction coefficient feedback control.

A motor controller configured to drive a permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) with Field Oriented Control (FOC), includes a current controller configured to generate control signals for driving the PMSM. The current controller is configured to measure current information of the PMSM, including a direct-axis motor current and a quadrature-axis motor current. The current controller includes a direct-axis current regulator configured to receive a direct-axis reference current and the direct-axis motor current to generate a direct-axis error value based on a difference between the direct-axis reference current and the direct-axis motor current. The current controller includes a voltage regulator configured to regulate a DQ voltage vector comprising a direct-axis motor voltage and a quadrature-axis motor voltage, wherein the voltage regulator generates the direct-axis motor voltage based on the direct-axis error value and a voltage vector limiting function to drive the direct-axis motor current to zero.

Described is a method of controlling operation of a synchronous motor. The method comprises, during constant power/speed motor operation, determining a value of a stator voltage (v.sub.s.sup.2) for an orthogonal rotating reference frame of the motor. Comparing the value of the determined stator voltage (v.sub.s.sup.2) to a threshold voltage (v.sub.s.sup.2.sub._max 1), said threshold voltage (v.sub.s.sup.2.sub._max 1) having a value between that of a maximum stator voltage (v.sub.s.sup.2.sub._max 0) for a basic speed mode of operation of the motor and that of a maximum stator voltage (v.sub.s.sup.2.sub._max 2) of the motor closed loop controller. If the determined value of the stator voltage (v.sub.s.sup.2) is greater than or equal to the value of the threshold voltage (v.sub.s.sup.2.sub._max 1), then controlling operation of the motor in a flux weakening mode of operation until a value of a current component (i.sub.d−Δi.sub.d) in a d-axis reaches a maximum negative value (−i.sub.d max), or until the value of the stator voltage (v.sub.s.sup.2) is less than the value of the threshold voltage (v.sub.s.sup.2.sub._max 1).

A motor control device for a motor including first and second winding sets, includes: first and second inverters; and a control unit that controls the first and second inverters by differentiating a magnitude of current flowing through the first winding set and a magnitude of current flowing through the second winding set, or by restricting an output voltage of the second inverter so as to reduce a first output voltage from the first inverter to the first winding set when the first output voltage is higher than a first upper limit voltage.