DSP-based sensor fault-tolerant control of electric vehicle powertrains

This paper describes a sensor fault-tolerant control for a high performance induction motor drive that propels an electrical vehicle. The proposed strategy deals with instrument failure detection and isolation within a reconfigurable induction motor direct torque control scheme. To increase the vehicle powertrain reliability regarding speed sensor failures, a maximum likelihood voting algorithm is implemented. It uses two virtual sensors (extended Kalman filter and an adaptive observer) and the encoder. Experiments on an induction motor drive and simulations on an electric vehicle are carried-out using a European urban and extra urban driving cycle to show that the proposed sensor fault-tolerant control approach is effective and provides a simple configuration with high performance in term of speed and torque responses.