Performance Investigation of a Fault-Tolerant Brushless Permanent Magnet AC Motor Drive

Abstract

Fault-tolerant motor drives are required in various safety critical applications. Using special motor design and inverter topology, brushless permanent magnet AC motor drives can have a fault-tolerant capability. In this paper, a dual motor drive configuration has been proposed which offer high robustness and reliability. This paper studies various critical performance characteristics of the dual motor drive including drive loss and system efficiency. The paper aims to address some of important performance issues in the motor drive, which has not been addressed previously. The paper presents the details of the experimental setup and explains the measurement methods for the motor parameters and for the open-circuit torque loss. The efficiency prediction method and corresponding results are also presented and verified by the computer simulation study both under healthy and various faulty conditions