Evaluation of saliency tracking as an alternative for health monitoring in PMSM-drives under non-stationary conditions

This paper evaluates the capability of saliency tracking to assess the health condition of permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) drives operating under non-stationary conditions. The evaluated scheme is based on saliency tracking methods, which are associated to the accurate sensorless control of AC drives without zero speed limitations. In this work two representative saliency tracking architectures are evaluated: high frequency (HF) injection, and PWM transient excitation. Although a monitoring approach based on HF injection was previously reported, a comparative study to evaluate the most representative saliency tracking schemes to assess health condition in drives was still missing. The aim of this work is to fill out this gap by evaluating and comparing two saliency-based monitoring schemes (one based on HF-injection and the other based on PWM transient excitation) to evaluate their performance in the presence of inter-turn winding faults. Simulation and experimental results are presented which confirm that both schemes offer excellent detection capabilities and that are suitable for drives operating under nonstationary conditions including standstill operation.