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Abstract—A four-quadrant sensorless controller for switched a negative torque, and limit the resolution at high speed. Am-
reluctance motor (SRM) drives is presented in this paper. The plitude modulation [3] is another technique to obtain the rotor
drive system with appropriate turn-on and turn-off angles for position from modulated amplitude of the sensed current. How-
each operating quadrant delivers excellent dynamic performance
over a wide speed range including zero speed. The problems ever, this technique requires external hardware circuitry, which
associated with practical implementation especially at low and adds cost and complexity to the system. Another simple sensor-
zero speeds have been addressed and overcome with engineering less technique is based on a current–flux–rotor position lookup
solutions. Experimental results for a 1–kW SRM obtained on a table [4]. Such an approach is simple and effective, but fails at
dSPACE-based system are presented along with useful guidelines low and zero speeds due to the flux integrator problem. Addi-
for practical implementation.
tionally, this method demands a high-memory processor to store
Index Terms—Four-quadrant control, position and speed esti- a good resolution lookup table. The observer-based techniques
mations, sensorless control, sliding-mode observer, switched reluc-
tance motors (SRMs), zero-speed control.
present an attractive alternative where terminal measurements of
phase voltages and currents are used to model the motor char-
acteristics and calculate the rotor position [5]–[7]. The design
I. INTRODUCTION and robustness analysis of sliding-mode-observer-based posi-
tion and speed estimation are well explained in [7].
S WITCHED reluctance motor (SRM) drives today are
gradually penetrating the market with applications already
developed or being developed for the consumer product,
Unfortunately, all of these studies focused exclusively on the
first quadrant operation: some methods are good for low and
aerospace, and automobile industries. The SRM drives have the medium speed only, while the rest are good for medium and
attractive features of fault tolerance and the absence of magnets. high speed only. The strategies provided are not sufficient for
However, the control of an SRM depends on the commutation highly dynamic loads, which require four-quadrant operation of
of the stator phases in synchronism with the rotor position. The the SRM. The combination of two methods, one for low speed
position-sensing requirement increases the overall cost and and the other for high speed, may solve the problem. However,
calls for extra space and complexity. This drawback excludes it will increase the implementation complexity, and incur addi-
the SRM from many cost sensitive industrial applications. tional expense for a higher memory processor and better reso-
Sensorless operation is a key requirement for the success of lution current sensor.
SRM drives in various industries [1]–[4]. Successful sensorless motor operation for a highly dy-
One method of sensorless operation is to detect the phase cur- namic load demands four-quadrant sensorless operation of
rent waveform and determine the rotor position by calculating the SRM including zero-speed position hold. In this paper,
the phase inductance from rate of change of the phase current a sliding-mode-observer-based sensorless technique [7] with
[1], [2]. This method needs the injection of diagnostic pulses safeguards against observer stability, flux estimator accuracy,
into an inactive phase. However, the diagnostic pulses generate model imperfection, and measurement noise is used for
four-quadrant sensorless operation. The primary focus is to
find the problems associated with practical implementation
Paper IPCSD 03–059, presented at the 2002 Industry Applications Society
Annual Meeting, Pittsburgh, PA, October 13–18, and approved for publica- and then to solve those for the development of a four-quadrant
tion in the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRY APPLICATIONS by the Industrial sensorless controller that covers a wide speed range including
Drives Committee of the IEEE Industry Applications Society. Manuscript sub- low- and zero-speed operation. The developed four-quadrant
mitted for review November 1, 2002 and released for publication May 31, 2003.
This work was supported by a contract between Delphi and The University of sensorless drive system has been evaluated experimentally.
Akron.
S. A. Hossain was with the Department of Electrical Engineering, The Uni-
versity of Akron, Akron, OH 44325-3904 USA. He is now with Globe Motors, II. SYSTEM DESCRIPTION
Dayton, OH 45404-1249 USA (e-mail: shossain@Globe-Motors.com).
I. Husain is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, The University of The four-quadrant sensorless SRM drive consists of an
Akron, Akron, OH 44325-3904 USA (e-mail: ihusain@uakron.edu). outer loop speed or torque controller and an inner loop current
H. Klode is with the Dayton Technical Center, Delphi E&C Systems, Dayton,
OH 45408 USA (e-mail: harald.klode@delphi.com). controller. The current controller has appropriate turn-on and
B. Lequesne, A. M. Omekanda, and S. Gopalakrishnan are with turn-off angles for each operating quadrant, which are set based
Delphi Research Labs, Shelby Township, MI 48315 USA (e-mail: bruno. on a chosen criterion such as torque-per-ampere maximization
lequesne@delphi.com; avoki.omekanda@delphi.com; gopalakrishnan@delphi.
com). or torque-ripple minimization [8]. The firing angle positions are
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TIA.2003.816541 switched when the motor operation changes from one quadrant
0093-9994/03$17.00 © 2003 IEEE
1344 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRY APPLICATIONS, VOL. 39, NO. 5, SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2003
(1)
where Here, is the number of turns per pole, is the number
of series paths, is the number of parallel paths, is the
stack length, is the stacking factor, is the radius to rotor
pole tips, is the air-gap length, is the total length of rotor
with and stator pole, is the rotor pole width, is the iron per-
meability, is the relative permeability, is the saturation
flux density, is the unaligned inductance, and is phase cur-
rent. The function is related to the unsaturated phase induc-
Here, is the estimated position, is the estimated speed, tance characteristics of the motor. The coefficient in is a
is the error function of measured flux and estimated flux number between 0–1, which depends on the profile of the unsat-
, and are the observer gains, and is the rotor po- urated phase inductance characteristics. The details of deriva-
sition dependent term which can be considered as 1 for mo- tion of the value of from geometry and material properties
toring operation and 1 for generating operation. are described in [9]. Fig. 2 shows the comparison of flux–cur-
The SMO-based sensorless operation was previously re- rent-position characteristics for measured and model data. The
ported for one-quadrant operation [7]. For dynamic actuator solid lines represent the measured data, and the dotted lines rep-
type applications, four-quadrant operation is essential. The resent the data obtained from the model.
dynamic load demands a small convergence rate of the observer A four-quadrant controller for SRM drives developed in [8]
to enhance the robustness and the poles of the closed-loop with optimal turn-on and turn-off angles in each operating quad-
system should be chosen accordingly. rant for torque/ampere maximization is chosen for motor con-
trol. The firing angle positions are switched when the motor op-
eration changes from one quadrant to another.
B. SRM Model and Control Strategy
C. Flux Estimator
An accurate, but simplified, SRM model is desired for the The phase flux is estimated from the integral form of
model-based estimators. The following SRM flux model [9] ex- Faraday’s law using phase current and phase voltage
pressed as a function of phase current and rotor position has measurements
been used in the implementation:
(2)
HOSSAIN et al.: FOUR-QUADRANT AND ZERO-SPEED SENSORLESS CONTROL OF SRM 1345
(3)
Fig. 6. Measured current, estimated current, and estimated flux using nominal
integrator.
Fig. 5. Flow diagram for the modified flux observer.
where and are the currents associated with the stored cou-
pling field energy and core losses, respectively. This is re-
sponsible for producing the energy associated with the energy
conversion loop. Therefore, the flux model needs to be modified
to
Fig. 7. Measured current, estimated current, and estimated flux using modified
(5) integrator.
where , and is a core-loss-dependent parameter, and is the aligned inductance and is the unaligned in-
it varies from 0.9 to 1.0 depending on the operating motor speed. ductance. The algorithm of the modified flux observer is given
in the flowchart of Fig. 5.
D. Modified Flux Estimator The estimated flux using the nominal integrator is observed
to have saturated at 31 mWb in Fig. 6 due to integrator problem.
The common approach to estimate the flux is to integrate the
Consequently, the estimated current from estimated flux be-
measured phase voltage according to (3). The method works
comes unobservable. Fig. 7 shows the measured current, es-
well in the higher speed range. However, at low and zero speeds
timated current and estimated flux using modified integrator.
the voltage measurement noise and integration drift pose a sig-
The flux estimator output was reset to when the integrator
nificant problem. The digital sampling error sometimes results
output flux saturates to .
in zero flux estimation even when the phase current is nonzero.
The performance of the simplex flux observer has been im-
proved by incorporating the phase current information more E. Voltage Measurement
dominantly as follows. During regeneration, the kinetic energy of the motor and
1) The estimator output will be greater than zero if the phase load is converted into electrical energy. Therefore, the capacitor
current is nonzero. The minimum value of the flux has voltage rise due to regeneration must be considered for accurate
been set to the minimum theoretical level of . flux estimation. Fig. 8 shows the significant increase of the
phase voltage due to the increase of the dc-link bus voltage
from the nominal value during regeneration.
G. Sensorless Starting
Although the time to reach the sliding surface for the ob-
server is finite, the error may be large at startup, leading to im-
proper phase excitation, hesitation and possibly reverse rotation.
To overcome this undesirable effect, the motor is driven toward
the desired direction using preset phase voltages when the load
dynamic characteristics is somewhat known. The motor starts in
an open-loop fashion in a short time, which is sufficient for the Fig. 10. Measured and estimated speed for four-quadrant speed control.
SMO to converge. However, the open-loop starting may fail for
a highly dynamic load.
H. Implementation of SMO
From the controls point of view, the chattering noise may in-
duce a problem in the estimation accuracy due to high innova-
tion gain. However, the chattering problems can be neglected
if the system time constant is higher than the controller exe-
cution time. For the proposed four-quadrant sensorless control,
the execution time is 110 s. However, the rotor time constant
is at least ten times higher than the execution
time. Therefore, the chattering noise does not affect the esti-
mated position.
I. Comparison With Table-Based Approach Fig. 11. Measured and estimated position during speed inversion.
In comparison with the conventional flux-current-rotor po-
sition lookup-table-based rotor position estimation technique,
IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
the SMO-based approach delivers a robust estimation of posi-
tion and speed. The SMO exhibits high degree of robustness The prototype setup to verify the four-quadrant sensorless
in the face of model uncertainty, parameter variation, initial control method experimentally is shown in Fig. 9. The test setup
rotor position error, and load torque disturbance, and possesses was designed for motion control applications, which can be
an automatic adaptation property with respect to the intensity operated in the variable-speed-controlled or position-controlled
of measurement noise [10]. The lookup-table-based approach loop. The controller algorithm has been implemented within a
is highly dependent on the accuracy of the static characteris- dSPACE rapid prototyping platform. The classic bridge power
tics of the machine. The error in flux estimation or model un- converter was used to meet the commutation requirements.
certainty will easily lead to error in position estimation. Fur- Relevant experimental results showing the performance of the
thermore, the motor speed in the lookup-table-based method is proposed sensorless scheme are presented. The SRM drive
obtained by differentiating the position, which may lead to sta- was operated in closed-loop four-quadrant mode completely
bility problems during four-quadrant operation in the case of er- sensorlessly using the position and speed information obtained
roneous position estimation. On the other hand, the modification from the observer. Position information from an encoder is
in flux estimation helps the SMO to be observable at zero-speed presented for comparison only.
crossing, enabling the SMO to give both the rotor position and Figs. 10 and 11 show a comparison between the measured po-
speed simultaneously. sition and estimated position, and measured speed and estimated
1348 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRY APPLICATIONS, VOL. 39, NO. 5, SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2003
V. CONCLUSION
This paper presented a four-quadrant sensorless controller de-
Fig. 13. Measured current, estimated current, and estimated flux in the veloped in a test bench considering the practical implementa-
voltage-controlled mode. tion issues. The motor speed command was toggled from one
rotational direction to another through zero speed without any
mechanical position sensor. The rotor position of the SRM is es-
timated at zero operating speed by imposing a high-frequency
speed command. The flux estimator and the SR motor modeling
imperfection were modified to reduce the cumulative error at
zero and low speeds. The experimental results demonstrate the
feasibility of the proposed four-quadrant sensorless scheme.
REFERENCES
[1] W. D. Harris and J. H. Lang, “A simple motion estimator for variable
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Fig. 14. Measured current, estimated current, and estimated flux at second plication of sensor integration techniques to switched reluctance motor
quadrant operation. drives,” IEEE Trans. Ind. Applicat., vol. 28, pp. 1339–1344, Nov./Dec.
1992.
[3] M. Ehsani, I. Husain, S. Mahajan, and K. R. Ramani, “New modulation
speed, respectively, during motor speed inversion. A speed ref- techniques for rotor position sensing in switched reluctance motors,”
erence switching from 3500 to 3500 r/min is applied, necessi- IEEE Trans. Ind. Applicat., vol. 30, pp. 85–91, Jan./Feb. 1994.
[4] J. P. Lyons, S. R. MacMinn, and M. A. Preston, “Flux/current methods
tating four-quadrant operation of the drive system. The rotor po- for SRM rotor position estimation,” in Conf. Rec. IEEE-IAS Annu.
sition has been wrapped to confine measurement and estimation Meeting, Dearborn, MI, 1991, pp. 482–487.
within one electrical cycle. In the first and third quadrants, the [5] A. Lumsdaine and J. H. Lang, “State observers for variable reluctance
motors,” IEEE Trans. Ind. Electron., vol. 37, pp. 133–142, Apr. 1990.
motor operates above the base speed. The measured current, es- [6] I. Husain, S. Sodhi, and M. Ehsani, “Sliding mode observer based
timated flux, and the estimated current during the current control control for switched reluctance motors,” in Conf. Rec. IEEE-IAS Annu.
mode and single-pulse mode for first or third quadrant operation Meeting, Denver, CO, 1994, pp. 635–643.
[7] R. McCann, M. S. Islam, and I. Husain, “Application of sliding mode
are presented in Figs. 12 and 13, respectively. Fig. 14 shows the observer for switched reluctance motor drives,” IEEE Trans. Ind. Ap-
flux and current estimation for second quadrant operation. Fi- plicat., vol. 37, pp. 51–58, Jan./Feb. 2001.
nally, Fig. 15 shows the position estimation of the system oper- [8] S. A. Hossain, I. Husain, H. Klode, B. Lequesne, and A. Omekanda,
“Four-quadrant control of switched reluctance motor for a highly dy-
ating at a constant, but very low speed. The speed reference in namic actuator load,” in Proc. IEEE APEC, vol. I, Dallas, TX, Mar.
this case is 60 r/min. 2002, pp. 41–47.
HOSSAIN et al.: FOUR-QUADRANT AND ZERO-SPEED SENSORLESS CONTROL OF SRM 1349
[9] S. A. Hossain and I. Husain, “A geometry based simplified analytical Bruno Lequesne (M’85–SM’89–F’97) received the
model of switched reluctance machines for real-time controller imple- Certified-Engineer degree from the Ecole Supérieure
mentation,” in Proc. IEEE PESC, Cairns, Australia, June 2002, pp. d’Electricité, Gif-sur-Yvette, France, in 1978, and the
839–844. Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the Uni-
[10] M. S. Islam, I. Husain, R. J. Veillette, and C. Batur, “Design and per- versity of Missouri, Rolla, in 1984.
formance analysis of sliding-mode observers for sensorless operation His is currently a Senior Staff Research Engineer
of switched reluctance motors,” IEEE Trans. Contr. Syst. Technol., sub- with Delphi Research Labs, Shelby Township, MI.
mitted for publication. His research interests are in the areas of electrical
automotive systems, drive-by-wire mechatronic sys-
tems, power generators, sensors, and related issues.
He is the holder of 25 patents, primarily on sensors and linear actuators.
Syed A. Hossain (S’01–M’02) received the B.Sc. Dr. Lequesne is the recipient of several Best Paper Awards from the IEEE
and M.Sc. degrees in electrical and electronic engi- Industry Applications Society (IAS), its Electrical Machines Committee, and
neering from Bangladesh University of Engineering the Society of Automotive Engineers.
and Technology, Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 1994 and
1997, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical
engineering from The University of Akron, Akron,
OH, in 2002.
From 1994 to 1998, he was a Lecturer and then
an Assistant Professor at Bangladesh University of
Engineering and Technology. In the summers of 2000
and 2001, he was with Delphi Research Laboratories,
Shelby Township, MI. He is currently a Senior Project Engineer with Globe
Motors, Dayton, OH, where he is engaged in the design and development of
controls for brushless motors. His technical interests include the development Avoki M. Omekanda (M’95–SM’97) received
of high-performance brushless motor servo drives for automotive applications. the bachelor’s degree in physics from Mohammed
V University, Rabat, Morocco, in 1984, and the
Engineer and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering
from the Faculté Polytechnique de Mons, Mons,
Iqbal Husain (S’89–M’89–SM’99) received Belgium, in 1987 and 1993, respectively.
the B.Sc. degree from Bangladesh University of Following the receipt of the Engineer’s diploma,
Engineering and Technology, Dhaka, Bangladesh, he worked for A.C.E.C Corporation, Charleroi, Bel-
in 1987, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Texas gium. In January 1990, he joined the Faculté Poly-
A&M University, College Station, in 1989 and 1993, technique de Mons as a Research Engineer. His re-
respectively, all in electrical engineering. search interests included computer-aided design for
He is currently a Professor in the Department of switched reluctance machines and magnetic field computation using numer-
Electrical and Computer Engineering, The Univer- ical methods. After receiving the Ph.D. degree, he was an Assistant Professor
sity of Akron, Akron, OH, engaged in teaching and in the Electrical Engineering Department, Faculté Polytechnique de Mons, for
research. He was a summer researcher at Wright two years. In June 1995, he joined the General Motors Research and Develop-
Patterson AFB Laboratories in 1996 and 1997. ment Center, Warren, MI, as a Senior Research Engineer. In 1999, he became
Previously, he was a Lecturer at Texas A&M University and also a Consulting part of Delphi Research Labs, Shelby Township, MI, where he is currently a
Engineer with Delco Chassis, Dayton, OH. His research interests are in the Staff Research Engineer. His research interests include design, analysis, and
areas of control and modeling of electrical drives, design of electric machines, control of electric machines, in particular, switched reluctance, for automotive
and development of power conditioning circuits. He has worked extensively applications.
in the development of switched reluctance motor drives, including sensorless Dr. Omekanda is a Member of the Association des Ingénieurs de Mons (Bel-
controllers. gium) and Société des Electriciens et des Electroniciens (France).
Dr. Husain received the 2000 IEEE Third Millennium Medal and the 1998
IEEE Industry Applications Society Outstanding Young Member Award. He is
also the recipient of three IEEE Committee Prize Paper Awards.