Study of IPMSM Interturn Faults Part II: Online Fault Parameter Estimation

This paper is a continuation of part I, which presented interturn fault (ITF) models for interior permanent magnet synchronous motors (IPMSMs). ITFs are defined by two ITF parameters: the healthy turn ratio and the fault contact resistance. First, this paper presents a proof that the two fault parameters defining a given ITF condition cannot be individually estimated from motor information and drive information (applied voltage, phase current, rotor speed, etc.) because they have multiple solutions. However, it is also shown that the additional Ohmic loss, which is the most important factor in heat generation and deterioration due to ITFs, is not dependent on these solutions. Thus, after arbitrarily setting one fault parameter, the other can be estimated for a given ITF condition; this model can be used to represent the effect of an ITF, particularly its Ohmic power loss. In this paper, an online fault parameter estimation method for IPMSMs is proposed after presenting one of the two fault parameters. The proposed method utilizes a searching algorithm that finds the fault parameter that has the minimum negative-sequence voltage error between the applied voltage and the ITF models (presented in part I). An experiment was performed to verify the proposed fault parameter estimation method.