Fault-Tolerant Predictive Current Control of Six-Phase PMSMs With Minimal Reconfiguration Requirements

By manipulating the additional degrees of freedom of multiphase machines, inherent to this type of machine, fault-tolerant control strategies are able to keep multiphase drives in service after one or more open-phase faults (OPFs). Therefore, multiphase machines controlled by finite control set model predictive control (FCS-MPC) strategies are an excellent fit for critical systems, where reliability and excellent dynamic performance are necessary. However, the existing fault-tolerant FCS-MPC strategies typically require considerable changes to the structure of the control algorithm when transitioning between healthy and fault-tolerant modes of operation. Therefore, this article proposes a novel fault-tolerant predictive current control (FT-PCC) strategy with minimal reconfiguration requirements for the six-phase permanent magnet synchronous machine (PMSM) drives. The proposed method only requires the adjustment of current references during fault-tolerant operation and keeps the structure of the control algorithm unchanged. To validate this FT-PCC strategy, several simulation and experimental results are presented for different OPF scenarios, in which the excellent performance obtained with the proposed method is demonstrated.