IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MAGNETICS, VOL. 49, NO.

7, JULY 2013 3383

Sensorless Control Strategy of Electrical Variable Transmission Machines

for Wind Energy Conversion Systems
Ying Zhu, Ming Cheng, Wei Hua, and Bangfu Zhang
School of Electrical Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, 210096, China

This paper focuses on the control for the dual power flow wind energy conversion system (DPF-WECS) based on the permanent
magnet electrical variable transmission (PM-EVT) machine. The PM-EVT machine can be considered as two permanent magnet syn-
chronous machines (PMSMs) by ignoring the magnetic field coupling between the inner rotor and stator windings. For the DPF-WECS,
the speed of the inner rotor should be controlled precisely to generate the constant voltage and constant frequency electricity. However,
the rotor position of the inner PMSM composed of the inner rotor and outer rotor is difficult to be measured exactly due to the rotational
stator and rotor. Thus the inner PMSM is hardly to be controlled using vector control strategy with the measured rotor position. In
this paper, a sensorless control strategy based on the model reference adaptive system (MRAS) for the PM-EVT machines with double
layer permanent magnet outer rotor for the DPF-WECS is proposed and evaluated by simulation. The effectiveness of proposed control
strategy is verified by experimental results.
Index Terms—Dual power flow wind energy conversion system (DPF-WECS), electrical variable transmission (EVT), permanent
magnet synchronous machine (PMSM), sensorless control strategy.

I. INTRODUCTION

R ECENTLY, the electrical variable transmission (EVT)

machine with two mechanical ports and two electrical
ports is studied widely in the field of hybrid electrical vehicles
(HEV) [1]–[4]. The permanent magnet EVT (PM-EVT), as
shown in Fig. 1, has gained more attention due to higher effi-
ciency and torque density. On the other hand, in a geared wind
energy conversion system (WECS) with a high speed generator,
the multilevel mechanical gearbox is the most vulnerable part
especially in high capacity offshore wind farms and poses a
great difficulty to maintain [5]. Hence, the dual power flow
wind energy conversion system (DPF-WECS) based on the
PM-EVT machine was proposed to solve the existing problems
in traditional WECSs due to the mechanical gearbox [6]–[8].
The PM-EVT can be seen as the combination of two per-
manent magnet synchronous machines (PMSMs)—the outer
PMSM composed of the stator and the outer rotor and the inner
PMSM composed of the inner rotor and the outer rotor [9]. It
has been proved that the magnetic coupling between the inner
motor and outer motor can be very small and neglected with
a good design though the outer rotor is common [10]. For the
DPF-WECS, the speed of the inner rotor has to remain constant
so that the main generator can generate constant voltage and
constant frequency electricity. Therefore, the rotor speed and
position of the inner PMSM should be detected accurately.
However, the rotor position of the inner PMSM especially the
initial position is difficult to be measured by using position
sensors due to the fact that both the stator and rotor of the inner
machine are rotational.
Manuscript received November 04, 2012; accepted January 24, 2013. Date
of current version July 15, 2013. Corresponding author: M. Cheng (e-mail:
mcheng@seu.edu.cn).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TMAG.2013.2243904
Fig. 1. Configuration of the PM-EVT machine.
Sensorless control strategies can be adopted to estimate the
rotor position of the inner PMSM of EVT to solve the problem
by adopting position sensors. Several sensorless control algo-
rithms have been investigated: estimators using state equations,
Luenberger or Kalman-filter observers, sliding mode control,
model reference adaptive systems (MRASs), saliency effects,
artificial intelligence and so on. Among these techniques,
MRAS schemes are the most common strategies due to their
relative simplicity and low computational effort [11].
In this paper, the MRAS based sensorless control strategy
for the inner rotor of PM-EVT applied to the DPF-WECS is
proposed and developed. Besides, the optimum tip speed ratio
MPPT strategy is applied to the outer rotor. Then simulation
based on Matlab/Simulink is carried out to illustrate the validity
of the proposed strategy for the PM-EVT based DPF-WECS.
Furthermore, the experimental result is given to verify the effi-
ciency of the proposed strategy.
II. DPF-WECS BASED ON THE PM-EVT
The configuration of the DPF-WECS based on the PM-EVT
is shown in Fig. 2. The WECS consists of the wind turbine, the
PM-EVT machine, the back-to-back converters and the gener-
ator. The PM-EVT enclosed in the dash line is composed of
three parts, namely, a wound stator (#1), a PM outer rotor (#2)
and a wound inner rotor (#3). The wind turbine is connected
to the outer rotor of the PM-EVT machine while the generator

0018-9464/$31.00 © 2013 IEEE

3384
Fig. 2. Configuration of the DPF-WECS based on the PM-EVT.
Fig. 3. Control block diagram of the DPF-WECS based on the PM-EVT.
is connected with the inner rotor. The power supplied by the
wind turbine can be divided into two parts, namely mechan-
ical power and electric power . The mechanical power
is transmitted through the coupling of the two rotors with high
efficiency, while the electrical power is transmitted to the
inner rotor by the back-to-back converter with relatively low
efficiency.
III. PROPOSED CONTROL STRATEGY FOR DPF-WECS
As mentioned before, the PM-EVT can be equivalent to two
PMSMs, named as the outer PMSM and inner PMSM. The con-
trol purpose of the outer rotor is to achieve maximum power
point tracking (MPPT) for the DPF-WECS. Hence the rotor
speed of the outer PMSM is controlled to meet the optimum
value for obtaining the optimum tip speed ratio. Since the outer
PMSM composed of the stator and the outer rotor has the same
structure as the normal PMSM, the MPPT strategy by control-
ling the speed is easy to be realized.
The control purpose of the inner rotor is to achieve the syn-
chronous speed so as to achieve constant voltage and constant
frequency electricity.
Vector control is a popular control strategy for PMSMs. The
command is produced by the speed controller using the speed
error signal as input. The command is set to zero to sim-
plify the control. The vector control block diagram for the DPF-
WECS based on the PM-EVT is shown in Fig. 3.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MAGNETICS, VOL. 49, NO. 7, JULY 2013
As aforementioned, the inner PMSM composed of the inner
rotor and the outer rotor is different from the traditional PMSM
due to the fact that both the outer rotor and inner rotor are ro-
tational. The rotor speed of the inner PMSM can be considered
as the rotational speed difference between the outer rotor and
inner rotor. Thus the rotor position of the inner PMSM is code-
termined by the inner rotor and the outer rotor, which can be
derived as
(1)
where is the rotor speed of the inner PMSM, is the outer
rotor speed, is the inner rotor speed. According to (1), the
accurate speed signals of both the outer rotor and inner rotor
are needed to obtain the . However, cumulative errors of the
rotor speed and position detected by the sensors may be pro-
duced by the operation of the system. Besides, the error of the
inner PMSM position will be greater due to the subtracting of
the values with possible errors.
To improve the accuracy of the position signal, the MRAS
based sensorless control is adopted for the inner PMSM. The
rotor position of the inner PMSM can be estimated while the
outer rotor speed and position will be measured by the sensor.
Then the rotor speed of the inner PMSM is only relying on one
sensor.
The dynamic model for the inner PMSM can be written as
(2)
where , , , , , , and are current components,
voltage components, resistance, inductance and permanent
magnet flux linkage, respectively. Then (2) can be derived as
(3)
while (4)
The adaptive model of the MRAS observer can be obtained
from (3) by using estimated value and given as
(5)
where variables with means the estimated value. According to
the reference model (3) and the adaptive model (5), the block
diagram of the MRAS observer can be obtained as shown in
Fig. 4.
In the MRAS scheme, it is performed by defining a speed
tuning signal to be minimized by a PI controller, which gen-
erates the estimated speed that is fed back to the adaptive model.
The speed tuning signal and the estimated speed can be ex-
pressed as
(6)
(7)
ZHU et al.: SENSORLESS CONTROL STRATEGY OF ELECTRICAL VARIABLE TRANSMISSION MACHINES FOR WIND ENERGY CONVERSION SYSTEMS
Fig. 4. Typical MRAS observer.
TABLE I
PARAMETERS OF THE PROTOTYPE
where is the integral coefficient, is the proportional co-
efficient. By substituting (4) into (7), the estimated speed can be
obtained as
(8)
current control strategy is most commonly used for the
vector control for the PMSM due to the simplicity and effec-
tiveness. When adopting control, the actual of the
machine will be close to zero and the MRAS observer (8) can
be simplified as
(9)
From (9) it can be known that the estimated speed of the inner
PMSM is only determined by the -axis current. Therefore, the
velocity of the observing speed can be improved obviously.
The simulation and experiment will be developed based on this
scheme to testify the effectiveness.
IV. SIMULATION AND EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
To testify the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy,
a PM-EVT prototype with the rated capacity of 10 kW has been
designed and built for verification. The parameters of the proto-
type of the PM-EVT are listed in Table I.
A. Simulation Results
The proposed control strategy for the WECS based on
the PM-EVT is first validated by the simulation platform
of Matlab/Simulink. The simulated waveforms are shown in
3385
Fig. 5. Simulation waveforms of the WECS based on the PM-EVT. (a) Outer
rotor speed. (b) Inner rotor speed. (c) Rotor position of the inner PMSM.
Fig. 5. Fig. 5(a) illustrates the outer rotor speed of the PM-EVT.
It can be seen that the actual speed follows the reference speed
well, which means that the MPPT control is realized. The
simulated result of the inner rotor speed based on the MRAS
control is shown in Fig. 5(b). From 0 s to 0.6 s, the inner rotor
is not started, the speed is zero and then the speed of inner
PMSM is equal to the outer rotor speed with opposite rotation
direction. The inner rotor speed is set to 1000 r/min at 0.6 s,
then the inner rotor speed remains the constant given value
as shown in Fig. 5(b). It can be seen from Fig. 5(c) that the
estimated rotor positions of the inner PMSM match the actual
ones very well. The simulation results verify the effectiveness
of MPPT control strategy for the outer rotor and MRAS based
sensorless control for the inner rotor.
B. Experimental Results
The 10 kW PM-EVT prototype was fabricated as shown in
Fig. 6. The three parts of the prototype are shown in Fig. 6(a)
and the experimental platform is shown in Fig. 6(b).
Fig. 7 shows the experimental results of the PM-EVT with
the proposed strategy. The MRAS control for the inner rotor is
tested first when the outer rotor is not started. The step speed is
given to the inner rotor. The measured inner rotor speed wave-
form is shown in Fig. 7(a). It can be seen that the actual speed
can follow the given reference speed well. The estimated inner
rotor position demonstrated in Fig. 7(b) varies regularly from 0
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Fig. 6. Experimental prototype and test platform. (a) Structure of the three parts
of the PM-EVT. (b) Experimental platform.
Fig. 7. Experimental waveforms of the WECS based on the PM-EVT. (a) Inner
rotor speed. (b) Inner rotor position. (c) Inner rotor speed and outer rotor speed.
to . The effectiveness of the MRAS based control strategy for
the inner rotor is verified when the outer rotor is at standstill.
Furthermore, the inner rotor is controlled to remain the
constant speed and the outer rotor is controlled to realize the
MPPT. The experimental waveform of the rotor speed is shown
in Fig. 7(c), where the left Y-axis is the outer rotor speed and
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MAGNETICS, VOL. 49, NO. 7, JULY 2013
the right Y-axis is the inner rotor speed. The step wind speed
is given to test the MPPT efficiency. It can be seen that the
outer rotor speed can follow the reference optimum speed well,
which means that the MPPT control is realized. The inner rotor
speed under the sensorless control based on the MRAS observer
remains 200 r/min while the outer rotor speed is changing. The
experimental results shown in Fig. 7 verify the effectiveness of
the proposed strategy for the WECS based on the PM-EVT.
V. CONCLUSION
In this paper, the control strategy for the PM-EVT based DPF-
WECS is designed and developed. The sensorless control based
on the MRAS is adopted in the control of inner rotor to im-
prove the performance and reliability of the system. Besides,
the optimum speed ratio MPPT control strategy is developed
for the outer rotor of the PM-EVT. Both the simulation and ex-
perimental results of the PM-EVT confirm the effectiveness of
the proposed control strategy. The control strategy proposed in
this paper is also meaningful for the EVT machines applied to
other fields.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was supported in part by Grants from the National
Natural Science Foundation of China (Project 51137001),
Innovative Scholar Ascent Program of Jiangsu Province, China
(Project BK2010013), and Scientific Research Innovation Plan
for graduate students in Jiangsu Province of 2011 (Project
CXLX_0109).
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