1134
5, OCTOBER 2000
Experimental Fault-Tolerant Control
of a PMSM Drive
Silverio Bolognani, Member, IEEE, Marco Zordan, and Mauro Zigliotto, Member, IEEE
Abstract—The paper describes a study and an experimental
verification of remedial strategies against failures occurring in
the inverter power devices of a permanent-magnet synchronous
motor drive. The basic idea of this design consists in incorporating
a fourth inverter pole, with the same topology and capabilities
of the other conventional three poles. This minimal redundant
hardware, appropriately connected and controlled, allows the
drive to face a variety of power device fault conditions while
maintaining a smooth torque production. The achieved results
also show the industrial feasibility of the proposed fault-tolerant
control, that could fit many practical applications.
Index Terms—Fault-tolerant control, permanent-magnet syn-
chronous motor drives.
NOMENCLATURE
Motor phase currents.
Zero-sequence and neutral currents.
Transformed – currents.
Transformed – currents.
Phase-to-neutral voltages.
Stator resistance.
Stator direct, quadrature, and leakage induc-
tance.
Permanent-magnet flux linkage.
Motor speed and position (electrical).
I. INTRODUCTION
S EVERAL failures can afflict electrical motor drives
[1]–[7] and many different remedial techniques have
been proposed [8]–[11]. So far, redundant or conservative
design has been used in every application where continuity of
operations is a key feature. Nevertheless, some applications
accept short torque transients and even permanently reduced
drive performance after fault, on condition that the drive still
goes on running. This is the clear case of home and civil
appliances, such as, for example, air conditioning/heat pumps,
engine cooling fans, electric vehicles, laboratory stirrers,
but also some industrial loads, such as pumping plants and
winders/unwinders, well tolerate such drive behavior. While
current regulation has greatly improved the torque response
of ac drives, an emerging technology aims to exploit current
Manuscript received January 22, 1999; revised May 16, 2000. Abstract pub-
lished on the Internet July 1, 2000. This paper was presented at IEEE IECON’98,
Aachen, Germany, August 31–September 4, 1998.
The authors are with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Uni-
versity of Padova, 35131 Padova, Italy (e-mail: bolognan@dei.unipd.it;
mauroz@dei.unipd.it).
Publisher Item Identifier S 0278-0046(00)08845-6.
0278–0046/00$10.00 © 2000 IEEE
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 47, NO.
control to mitigate the effects of a sudden inverter failure. A
first effective example, applied to induction motors (IMs), can
be found in [11]. The strategy consists in reformulating the
current references so that the rotating MMF generated by the
armature currents do not change, even if one phase is open
circuited after a fault occurrence. For proper operation, the
neutral point of the motor has to be connected to the midpoint
of the dc voltage link, created by the use of two capacitors. The
technique, in principle quite simple, gets involved by the need
for preventing the capacitor midpoint voltage from drifting
from the correct point. A valid alternative that does not require
the availability of the dc midpoint voltage is proposed in [14],
which deals with multiphase current-regulated IM drives. Other
important aspects that heavily affect any remedial strategy
are the number of additional components with respect to the
standard drive, and the method used to isolate the faulty phase
from the rest of the drive. Again, for IM drives, a solution can
be found in [10], in which a pair of back-to-back-connected
SCRs is used to switch off the faulty motor phase current.
After the fault, a phase remains permanently connected to
the midpoint of the dc voltage or, when insufficient voltage
is available, the neutral is connected back to the midpoint,
that has to be derived by using series-connected capacitors.
Obviously, each SCR needs a proper gate circuit and must
bear the rated phase current. Analogous research topics may
be found for permanent-magnet synchronous motor (PMSM)
drives [1], [2], [6], [7], which have an increasing market share
due to their excellent dynamics and high torque-to-current
and torque-to-volume ratios. Actually, the investigation of
fault-tolerant control techniques for PMSM drives is arousing
lively interest, to extend their use to applications where high
reliability is a key feature, such as aircraft and automotive
auxiliaries [8]. This paper is organized as follows. In Section II,
there is a list of the power stage faults which can be tolerated
by the proposed control scheme. The techniques suitable for
the detection of each particular fault are also illustrated. In
Section III, a survey of possible fault-tolerant drive schemes
incorporating a four-leg inverter is discussed, pointing out
advantages and drawbacks. In Section IV, a novel technique
for isolating the faulty pole of the inverter is illustrated and
experimental verifications are presented. In Section V, a new
fault-tolerant torque control scheme is presented from a theoret-
ical point of view. In Section VI, the practical implementation
is illustrated and the experimental results are given.
II. INVERTER FAULTS AND RECOGNITION TECHNIQUES
The failures that may involve the inverter power stage can
take place either in the switches of the inverter or in their gate
BOLOGNANI et al.: FAULT-TOLERANT CONTROL OF A PMSM DRIVE
Fig. 1. Fault-tolerant drive schemes.
command circuitry. The following permanent faulty situations
are considered in this paper:
1) open circuit of one power device;
2) open circuit of both power devices of an inverter leg;
3) short circuit of one power device;
4) short circuit of both power devices of an inverter leg.
Indeed, the fourth fault needs a very rapid hardware in-
tervention to avoid a destructive shoot-through fault. Even
in this case (that usually triggers a complete drive stop) the
technique presented in Section III manages the complete
isolation of the faulty pole and the beginning of the remedial
mode. Various fault-recognition techniques can be adopted. In
[13], a sophisticated procedure is proposed. However, simpler
and cost-effective solutions can be envisaged, avoiding any
special transducers or dedicated devices. For example, a smart
strategy compares the voltages at the device outputs and checks
if they correctly follow the corresponding triggering signals.
Another method takes advantage of the power devices desat-
uration voltages. Both strategies must carefully consider the
unavoidable delays in the switching instants and the necessary
electronics must be properly tuned according to the inverter
performance in order to distinguish a device failure from an
overload condition. In the analysis carried out in this paper, the
remedial strategy has been tested considering a failure in phase
; of course, similar actions apply when failures affect phase
or phase .
III. FAULT-TOLERANT DRIVE SCHEMES
As mentioned above, the proposed fault-tolerant drive
presents a four-pole inverter with the capability of isolating
one faulty pole, while activating (if not active yet) the fourth
auxiliary pole. Of course, a fault in a power device has to be
1135
detected and fixed before it causes, in turn, other damage. In
particular, it is supposed that power device faults do not damage
the control system, which will still work properly. The general
fault-tolerant drive scheme is drawn in Fig. 1(a).
On the left-hand side is represented a conventional three-
phase inverter whose poles can be completely isolated from the
dc bus in case of faults by the intervention of isolating devices,
sketched as fuses in the figure. Details of the isolating technique
will be given in the next section. Actually, the isolation devices
could be put in the motor terminals at the inverter output, but
the resulting structure would not bear the short circuit of both
the power devices in the inverter leg (fault #4). Such a fault
would put out of service the whole inverter. The right side of the
figure shows the additional fourth leg. According to the motor
winding configuration and the adopted remedial technique, dif-
ferent switching patterns can be generated for the fourth leg. De-
pending on the selected control strategy, the isolating devices
ID and ID [Fig. 1(a)], and the connecting devices (CDs)
[Fig. 1(b) and (c)] can be incorporated or not. Some possible
remedial techniques are discussed hereafter.
A. Three-Terminal Motor Winding
This is the case of delta-connected or star-connected wind-
ings with isolated neutral stator windings [Fig. 1(b)]. With
these configurations, a remedial strategy consists in replacing
the faulty pole with the fourth one. As a consequence, only
the three conventional inverter legs have to be equipped with
the isolating devices. The faulty pole is isolated and replaced
by the fourth one, turning on the related CD (e.g., a TRIAC
or a pair of back-to-back thyristors). No modification of the
digital control code is required, apart from the deviation of the
switching commands from the faulty pole to the fourth one.
For safety reasons, a null torque reference is delivered from
1136 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 47, NO. 5, OCTOBER 2000

TABLE I
CHARACTERISTICS OF DIFFERENT REMEDIAL TECHNIQUES

the rising edge of the fault detection signal, for the whole time
duration of the faulty inverter pole replacement.

B. Four-Terminal Motor Winding

This is the case of star-connected windings with accessible
neutral [Fig. 1(c)]. Two different operating conditions are pos- Fig. 2. Topology for isolating a faulty inverter pole.
sible with this motor windings configuration.
1) Fourth Pole Always Connected: Fourth pole inverters
for three-phase loads have been already presented [13], [14]
to get improved system performance. If such a configuration
is adopted for the healthy drive, the fourth leg is permanently
connected to the neutral. No CD is present in the drive. A fault
in one of the inverter legs is simply remedied by isolating the
leg itself. IDs are, therefore, incorporated also in the fourth
pole. If the fault occurs in the fourth pole, after the remedial
intervention the motor is supplied by a conventional three-leg
inverter. Conversely, if the fault occurs in one of the inverter
legs connected to the motor phases, then the motor has to be
supplied as described in the following technique in Section
III-B-2. Four digital pulsewidth modulation (PWM) outputs
(Section III-B-2) are required for these drives. A proper modi-
fication of the digital control code has to be performed during
the remedial intervention to adapt the control to the modified
inverter configuration which applies after the fault. However,
the time duration of the remedy intervention is limited by the
faulty pole isolation only. Fig. 3. Fuse current and capacitor voltage during pole isolation.
2) Fourth Pole Connected in Case Of Fault Only: In this
case, the fourth pole is connected to the motor neutral through call for a proper fuse protection of each inverter leg. A scheme
a CD activated together with the fourth pole itself at the fault that can be profitably used is reported in Fig. 2.
occurrence. No ID is incorporated in the fourth pole. Once a failure indicating a short or an open circuit of a switch
As illustrated in Section V, a slight modification of the digital is sensed, the whole inverter pole is disconnected by firing the
control code is required and the fourth pole is driven by the two SCRs, which, in turn, blow up the pole series-connected
PWM commands which were previously driving the faulty pole. fuses. Capacitors avoid a dc path through the SCRs, allowing
Table I summarizes the characteristics of the above-discussed their turn-off. The value of is chosen to have an energy
remedial techniques. The remedial solution in Section III-B-2 transfer from the main dc-link capacitor sufficient to blow the
is considered and proposed in this paper. fuses within a very short time. The scheme of Fig. 2 has been
realized and tested apart from the whole fault-tolerant drive.
IV. FAULTY POLE ISOLATION In Fig. 3, the current flowing through one of the fuses and the
As a first countermeasure after any fault detection, the pro- voltage across the series capacitor are represented.
posed remedial strategy forces the damaged inverter pole to be This test has been done for two purposes:
electrically isolated from the dc bus in order to eliminate its in- • to size the capacitor;
fluence over the drive behavior. The disconnection should be • to evaluate the current magnitude during phase disconnec-
rapid, for a prompt start of the remedial algorithm and for a tion.
consequent limited torque transient. In addition, it has to be ad- As concerns the first point, a minimum capacitor size is re-
equate to face either positive or negative faulty phase current, quired in order to overcome the fuse characteristic. In fact, if
as well as to be able to interrupt unidirectional current, as can the capacitor is too small, the voltage across its terminals rises
happen during some faults [6]. Such requirements make inad- immediately to the dc-bus value. The current flows through the
equate any electromagnetic switch or thyristor component, and fuse for a very short time, and its thermal limits could not be
BOLOGNANI et al.: FAULT-TOLERANT CONTROL OF A PMSM DRIVE
Fig. 4. Current vector loci in healthy and faulty drive.
reached. In Fig. 3, equal to 470 F is used, while is 3300
F charged to 300 V. In order to reduce the capacitor cost, a
greater capacitance with lower rated voltage may be used. For
instance, a of 8800 F is charged up to 15 V only during the
isolation process. The current peak gives the higher bound for
the circuit sizing. Fig. 3 refers to an ultrafast 12.5-A fuse with 30
A s as the value. With respect to Fig. 3, a maximum current
of 750 A and a residual voltage of 180 V are assumed. For
this application, a 450-V capacitor has been used for the sake of
safety. After the long pulse current which blows the fuse, an arc
current remains for a short time, slightly increasing the voltage
across .
V. FAULT-TOLERANT TORQUE CONTROL
From the point of view of the control strategy, the current ref-
erences, expressed in a synchronous – rotating frame fixed to
the rotor, do not have to be affected by the faulty condition, since
they represent the torque and flux demanded by the speed loop.
Therefore, it is easy to understand that, to preserve the drive per-
formance after the disconnection of one motor phase (remedial
strategy in Section III-B-2), the currents in the remaining two
healthy phases have to produce the same – current compo-
nents that were flowing before the fault and, thus, also the same
– currents in the stationary reference frame. A zero-sequence
component
(1)
of the stator current must arise, and the current vector trajectory
in the faulty drive departs from the – plane, where it moves
during healthy operation, to the – plane, as shown by the cur-
rent loci in the three–dimensional (3-D) space of Fig. 4.
This is an obvious consequence of the null phase current. To
obtain the same performance, the current locus after a fault has
to be an ellipse, whose projection on the – plane coincides
with the healthy current circle. In fact, the produced torque and
flux have to remain unchanged after the fault occurrence. The
flux- and torque-related motor currents are linked to the re-
spective – components by
(2)
1137
in which is the rotor electrical angle. From (2), it is evident
that, also, the components in the – plane have to remain un-
changed after the fault. In this situation, the stator zero-sequence
current component is found to be
(3)
as results substituting in the – – to – – transfor-
mation, given by (4).
(4)
The new current references can be calculated by substituting
(3) in (4), obtaining
(5)
where and are the unchanged – and – current
references. The reference for the neutral current becomes
(6)
The neutral current (6) flows through a connection between the
motor star center point and the fourth active inverter pole, as
shown in the proposed fault-tolerant scheme of Fig. 5.
The complete drive also includes outer proportional plus in-
tegral (PI) speed and – current loops, omitted in Fig. 5 for the
sake of clarity. The current loops produce the voltage references
and , that in healthy conditions are given as input to the
algorithm that implements the space-vector modulation (SVM)
technique [6]. Once the fault is sensed, the control algorithm
isolates the damaged inverter pole and starts the active control
of the fourth inverter pole connected to the motor star center. It
is worth noting that the additional pole commands can be
given by the microcontroller output first devoted to the faulty
pole , provided that an appropriate external switch logic is
arranged; the PWM algorithm remains exactly the same. Since
the number of available PWM outputs is strictly related to the
microcontroller, the mentioned possibility preserves it from the
need of expensive and often unacceptable modifications to ex-
isting hardware. An important issue that is worth highlighting
refers to the rise of sinusoidal components in the – reference
frame during operation after fault. With the symbols defined in
the Appendix, the steady-state – motor equations are
(7)
Neglecting the resistive terms, which are small compared to
the inductive ones, and adopting first the inverse of transfor-
1138 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 47, NO. 5, OCTOBER 2000

Fig. 5. Proposed fault-tolerant drive scheme.

mation (2) and then (4), the phase-to-neutral voltages of the current loop performance. In order to compensate for this
and can be obtained undesired effect, a feedforward term is added, indicated by the
“feedforward compensation” block in Fig. 5. The feedforward
components are obtained from (9) as

(10)

where

(11)

The compensation causes the current loop to produce

(8)
After the fault, the reference voltage vector produced by
the inverter and applied to the healthy phases ( , and neutral)
differs from the voltage vector that was applied to the motor
phases before the fault. Essentially, the difference is
proportional to , properly transformed in the – reference
frame. Using the inverse of transformation (2) and the first of
(8), the voltage vector can be written as
(9)
It is evident from (9) that, under faulty conditions, additional
sinusoidal components appear in the – voltage references, at
twice the frequency of the stator quantities. These quantities are
normally produced by the current PI controllers, to the detriment
constant voltage reference (Fig. 5) at steady state,
avoiding the tracking of the sinusoidal components, thus real-
izing the best PI controllers working conditions. Fig. 6 reports
the PI outputs and the voltage references with the feedforward
compensation at rated speed (coordinate scales are expressed
in p.u. of rated quantities).
VI. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
A laboratory prototype has been realized for the full-digital
implementation of the drive presented above. The control
hardware is based on a Texas Instruments C31 floating-point
digital signal processor (DSP) evaluation board, completed
with software tools for program trace and debug. Control
software has been mainly written in C language, with some
low-level subroutines written directly in assembly language.
The drive is completed with a 1-kW anisotropic PMSM with
sinusoidal electromotive forces (EMFs), fed by a four-pole
BOLOGNANI et al.: FAULT-TOLERANT CONTROL OF A PMSM DRIVE 1139

Fig. 9. Locus of the – currents during the fault occurrence.

Fig. 6. PI outputs and voltage references.

Fig. 10. Transformed d–q currents during the fault occurrence.

Fig. 7. Phase currents i ;i , and i and forth pole current i during the fault
occurrence.

Fig. 8. Transformed – currents during the fault occurrence.

insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) voltage inverter and an
interface board. Figs. 7–10 show the first experimental results,
measured on the prototype during the fault occurrence. During
the tests, the fault occurrence was emulated by forcing the
active state of a digital input. The same line, in the real case,
should be driven by a proper fault detection circuit, which can
be properly arranged. Fig. 7 reports the phase currents
and and the current of the fourth inverter pole .
Fig. 11. Transformed – voltages at steady state, after the fault.
After the fault, which occurs at the time , the faulty
pole is promptly disconnected by the circuit shown in Fig. 2.
Consequently, current suddenly drops to zero, while a neutral
current begins to flow, with an amplitude equal to the sum of
and . For and A, one can observe that the
phase currents are sinusoidal with a phase displacement of 60 ,
and amplitude of 1.21 A, according to (5). Fig. 8, taken under the
1140 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 47, NO. 5, OCTOBER 2000

Transformed d–q voltages at steady state, after the fault.

Transformed d–q currents, after the fault.
Fig. 12.
Fig. 15.

This is confirmed also by Fig. 9, in which the locus of the

phase current vector is drawn in the – plane. One can recog-
nize a circle with a radius of 0.7 A, sometimes disturbed by the
electromagnetic noise that afflicts the current measurement. The
good motor current control after the intervention of the remedial
technique is pointed out also in Fig. 10, where the actual direct
and quadrature motor currents are given as results by elaborating
the actual phase currents. They remain constant and at the same
level they had before the fault as requested by the current refer-
ences, thus avoiding any long torque transient. The combination
of balanced phase EMFs with the unbalanced voltage drops due
to the phase currents cause unbalanced voltages to be applied to
the motor phases. The transformed – components, at steady
state and at 30% of the rated speed, are shown in Fig. 11.
The unbalanced motor phase voltages reflect on the trans-
formed – voltages that contain a sinusoidal component at
Fig. 13. Healthy phase currents i and i and fourth pole current i , after the
fault. twice the frequency of the phase current, as shown in Fig. 12.
This agrees with the theoretical results given by (9).
Figs. 13–15 show the steady-state time behavior of the currents
at rated torque and higher speed, under fault conditions,
confirming the results already discussed.

VII. CONCLUSIONS
This paper has proposed a hardware and software remedial
strategy for PMSM drives affected by faults in the inverter
power devices. Experimental validations were given for the
faulty phase isolation technique and the torque control of the
faulty drive. The achieved results show both the industrial
feasibility of the proposed fault-tolerant control and the prompt
recovery from a fault occurrence, which could fit many prac-
tical applications.

APPENDIX
PMSM DATA
Fig. 14. Transformed – currents, after the fault.
Nominal torque 1.25 N m;
peak torque 3.75 N m;
same test conditions of Fig. 7, proves that the transformed – nominal speed 3600 r/min;
phase currents remain unchanged in spite of the asymmetrical nominal current 2 A rms;
feeding of the motor after the failure. This guarantees a smooth peak current 6.5 A rms;
torque and a regular overall operation of the faulty drive. pole pairs 4.
BOLOGNANI et al.: FAULT-TOLERANT CONTROL OF A PMSM DRIVE 1141

REFERENCES Marco Zordan was born in Padova, Italy, in 1970.

He received the degree in electronic engineering
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Silverio Bolognani (M’98) is a native of Trento

Province, Italy. He received the Laurea degree in
electrical engineering from the University of Padova,
Padova, Italy, in 1976.
In 1976, he joined the Department of Electrical
Engineering, University of Padova, where he was
involved in the analysis and design of thyristor
converters and synchronous motor drives. He also
founded the Electrical Drives Laboratory and carried
out research on brushless and induction motor drives.
He is presently engaged in research on advanced
control techniques for motor drives and motion control and on design of ac
electrical motors for variable-speed applications. He has authored more than
80 papers on electrical machines and drives. His teaching activity was first
devoted to electrical circuit and electromagnetic field theory and, later, to
electrical drives and electrical machine design. He is currently a Full Professor
of Electrical Drives.