A rotor initial position estimation method for sensorless field-oriented control of permanent magnet synchronous motor

In this paper, a new technique to improve initial rotor position detection at standstill of a permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) is presented. Sensorless field-oriented control (FOC) of a PMSM at low speed remains a difficult task. In order to estimate the position and rotor speed, we proposed a novel structure of a full-order sliding mode observer (FO-SMO) in a sensorless FOC. At standstill, we used a voltage pulse sequence applied to the windings in order to detect the initial rotor position. With this technique, we managed to minimize the error on the estimated rotor position to 3.75° (electrical) compared with others. The validity of the proposed approach with a 1.1-kW low-speed PMSM sensorless FOC has been proved by experimental results.