Sensorless Electric Drive for Integral Horsepower Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor

The permanent magnet synchronous motor PMSM is increasingly playing an important role in electric propulsion systems due to its many advantages over competing technologies. For successful implementation of the PMSM rotor position and speed information are required. A resolver or encoder attached to the shaft of the machine usually provides this information Many applications, however, cannot tolerate the use of the position sensor due to space and weight limitations, reliability concerns, or packaging issues. Thus, there has been an intense interest in the development of a so-called postion sensorless drive, where the PMSM stator itself is used as the rotor position sensor. In this work, a previously developed sensorless electric drive technique fl is applied to a high power permanent magnet machine. The sensorless drive hardware implementation is presented in detail. A set of experiments is used to quantify the performance of the sensorless drive approach under a wide variety of operating conditions, and implementation issues and results are discussed. The developed sensorless electric drive serves as a technology demonstrator for future naval applications