A Sinusoidal Current Control Strategy Based on Harmonic Voltage Injection for Harmonic Loss Reduction of PMSMs With Non-Sinusoidal Back-EMF

In permanent magnet synchronous machine design, a limited number of stator and rotor slots distorts the air-gap flux distribution and its effective length. It causes machine parameters to vary with the rotor position. The rotor flux linkage harmonics introduce nonsinusoidal back-EMF, which causes current harmonics when conventional PI current controller is adopted. Those machines suffer from high-frequency torque ripple due to air-gap flux harmonics in low-speed region. However, in high-speed region, where the torque ripple is filtered out by the mechanical system, the torque ripple may be disregarded. In this case, torque-ripple suppression methods and the associated harmonic current components generate losses. Therefore, a sinusoidal current control is required to reduce the undesired harmonic losses. In this manner, this article focuses on the sinusoidal current control strategy based on harmonic voltage injection, which requires knowledge of rotor magnet flux linkage harmonics. This article also proposes both off- and on-line schemes for the identification of rotor magnet flux linkage harmonics. These methods do not require any proprietary machine design details such as the shape of stator or rotor for finite element analysis. Commonly used PI plus resonant controller is also designed and its disadvantages in terms of speed-dependent gain and stability, in comparison to the proposed scheme, are highlighted. Finally, experimental results are presented to compare the proposed scheme with the conventional method at different operating conditions.