Sensorless Control of Synchronous Reluctance Motor Drives: Improved Modeling and Analysis Beyond Active Flux

The paper presents a framework for the design and analysis of position observers for sensorless control of synchronous reluctance machines. An improved inductance model is developed to account for the position error induced inductance variations. The instability regions of active flux based position observer are analytically identified and validated. A novel technique, Adaptive Projection vector for Position error estimation (APP), that alleviates the stability problems is introduced. Furthermore, the proposed technique can be augmented with a second projection vector to estimate speed error independently of the position error, referred to as Adaptive Projection vector matrix for Position and Speed error estimation (APPS). Stability and performance of proposed technique is validated on a 1 kW synchronous reluctance motor test bench.