A fault tolerant matrix converter motor drive under open phase faults

This paper proposes a fault tolerant four-phase matrix converter motor drive. The converter is used to drive a permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) for aerospace applications. The use of a fault tolerant topology improves the availability of the drive system under one phase open-circuit faults. To achieve the satisfactory motor performance under fault conditions, an additional redundant output phase is connected to the neutral point of motor windings. The direct space vector modulation technique used for a conventional three-phase matrix converter can be simply applied to the four-phase matrix converter with minor modifications. Moreover, the modified control strategy is introduced to maintain the good system performances with torque ripple minimization under faulted conditions. Experimental and simulation results are shown to verify the effectiveness of proposed fault tolerant four-phase matrix converter drive as well as the associated modulation and control.