Fault-tolerant control via four-leg inverter of a full-electric propulsion system for lightweight fixed-wing UAVs

The work deals with the development and the performance characterization of a novel control strategy for the detection, isolation and accommodation of coil faults in a three-phase Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor (PMSM), used to drive the propeller of a modern lightweight fixed-wing UAV. The health-monitoring algorithms on motor currents (used to detect the open-circuit fault and to activate the control reconfiguration) are based on a slope method, associated to the evaluation of the current phasor trajectory in the Clarke plane. Actually, when an open-circuit fault occurs in PMSM driven by a standard three-leg converter, the typical circular trajectory of the current phasor in the Clarke plane collapses into a linear track and relevant torque ripples are generated. On the other hand, if the PMSM is driven by a four-leg converter, a control reconfiguration can be applied: the fourth leg of the power bridge is in stand-by when the system operates without faults, but it is enabled to regulate the current flowing at the central point of the Y connection of the 3-phase PMSM. The performances of the fault-tolerant algorithms are assessed via detailed nonlinear simulation of the propulsion system (including propeller loads, electrical faults, mechanical transmission compliance, digital signal processing and sensors errors). The results demonstrate that the health-monitoring algorithms and the fault-tolerant control strategies permit to obtain extremely small detection and isolation latencies, and negligible performance degradation in terms of PMSM torque.