FPGA Based Sensorless Control of a Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor

Abstract: Field Oriented Control (FOC) has proven to be a high performance and robust control strategy for electrical drives. However the states of the machine, namely speed and/or position, have to be measured in this control strategy. Since the use of encoders decreases the robustness of the system and increases cost, increasing interest has been focused on sensorless control schemes.  This control strategy aims to eliminate the encoder, and estimate the speed and/or position of the machine based only on the currents and voltages measurements. In this thesis, sensorless controll of a permanent magnet synchronous machine (PMSM) is studied. Two methods are introduced in this work. The Extended Kalman Filter for the high speed range and the High Frequency injection method for low speed range. In addition, these methods are implemented using an FPGA instead of a DSP solution. Simulations and emperimental results are presented. The two methods prove to be effective in their respective speed ranges, and provide a basis for hybrid full speed sensorless controller.