Fault-tolerant permanent magnet machine drives

The paper examines the use of permanent magnet machine drives in high performance, safety-critical applications. Likely fault modes are identified and machine designs are developed for fault-tolerant operation, without severely compromising the drive performance. Fault tolerance is achieved by adopting a modular approach to the drive, with each phase electrically, magnetically, thermally and physically independent of all others. Power converter requirements are discussed and methods for controlling a faulted phase developed to minimise the impact of a machine or power converter fault.