Fault Tolerant Brushless DC Motor Drive for Aerospace Applications

This article brings out a Fault-tolerant BLDC motor drive for aerospace applications using the redundancy concept. In a way, it brings out a fault-tolerant strategy that can be used to continue the regular operation of a BLDC motor drive even after the occurrence of faults. As BLDC motors are used in critical and dangerous control areas like military services and space vehicles, a fault-tolerant drive is essential to maintain drive operation and provide desirable output. This article compares fault simulation results in the software model of a BLDC motor drive to those of fault simulation results in hardware for three main types of faults. Fault simulation is carried out for three types of faults, viz. inverter device open circuit fault, motor winding open circuit fault, and rotor position sensor (hall sensor) open-circuited fault. Fault tolerance is ensured by introducing a redundant drive (drive-2), which operates the complete drive at the advent of any of the faults mentioned above in the main (healthy) drive-1. A fault-tolerant (redundant) hardware comprising dual stator BLDC motor and redundant controllers is realized and operationalized. Fault simulation is carried out in this hardware, and these results are validated with the results of fault simulation in the MATLAB SIMULINK model. Software and hardware results are comparable and form a basis for developing fault-tolerant electro-mechanical actuation systems for high-reliability, high-cost applications, mainly aerospace.