A novel fault tolerant permanent magnet synchronous motor with improved optimal torque control for aerospace application

Abstract Improving fault tolerant performance of permanent magnet synchronous motor has always been the central issue of the electrically supplied actuator for aerospace application. In this paper, a novel fault tolerant permanent magnet synchronous motor is proposed, which is characterized by two stators and two rotors on the same shaft with a circumferential displacement of mechanical angle of 4.5°. It helps to reduce the cogging torque. Each segment of the stator and the rotor can be considered as an 8-pole/10-slot five-phase permanent magnet synchronous motor with concentrated, single-layer and alternate teeth wound winding, which enhance the fault isolation capacity of the motor. Furthermore, the motor has high phase inductance to restrain the short-circuit current. In addition, an improved optimal torque control strategy is proposed to make the motor work well under the open-circuit fault and short-circuit fault conditions. Simulation and experiment results show that the proposed fault tolerant motor system has excellent fault tolerant capacity, which is able to operate continuously under the third open-circuit fault and second short-circuit fault condition without system performance degradation, which was not available earlier.