PhD Thesis: Development of advanced fault tolerant sensorless algorithms for PMSMs

WATT & WELL has officially kicked off a PhD thesis to support the development of advanced fault tolerant sensorless algorithms for Permanent Magnet Synchronous Machines. This work is co-chaired by the SATIE laboratory of ENS Paris Saclay, the Green laboratory of Université de Lorraine and WATT & WELL.

Reliability is one of the most critical requirements when developing systems for space applications to maintain their safety and their performances. If this is true for systems like satellites, spacecraft or any other payload system, it is even truer for the space launch vehicle that lifts them into orbit. Indeed, a space launch failure is one of the most expensive losses because these payloads can easily cost hundreds of millions of dollars. This is the reason why faults must be detected, isolated, and prevented. The contribution of this thesis is to develop and investigate the performance of an advanced Fault-Tolerant Sensorless control of a 5-phase Permanent Magnet Synchronous Machine (PMSM) drive.

The main idea is to study the impact of electrical faults on the performance of the rotor position observers, make the suitable reconfigurations of these observers and then develop the necessary fault-tolerant control strategies that ensure the service continuity and ensure acceptable control/power efficiency of the overall drive.

For any information on this project, please contact nicolas.pacault@wattandwell.com – WATT & WELL Aerospace BU Director