Investigation of a fault tolerant and high performance motor drive for critical applications

Abstract

This paper evaluates a fault-tolerant electric motor drive with redundancy for a potential all-electric aircraft (AEA), and investigates to increase the redundancy against partial or complete motor failures. A flexible motor configuration is proposed to increase the redundancy against motor failures. The paper highlights the importance of effectively simulating the system on computer, and the way in which the ideas and techniques used to simulate the system have been adapted to the physical prototype. The computer modelling section of the paper outlines the steps involved with simulating the complete system using an object orientated programming language, LabVIEW, and some simulation results are provided.