Simplified model-free predictive current control for synchronous reluctance motor drive systems

Recently, an appealing switching strategy, named model-based predictive current control (MBPCC), has received much research attention in power electronics and drives. However, MBPCC usually requires system model (in discrete-time form) and the system parameters in its controller design. In order to eliminate these restrictions, a simplified model-free predictive current control (SMFPCC) is proposed for a synchronous reluctance motor (SynRM) drive system to reduce the switching frequency of the inverter and the computational load. For a six-switch three-phase inverter, it can generate eight switching states, including two zero-voltage vectors and six active-voltage vectors. Unlike the previous method developed in [1] that considers all switching states, the proposed SMF-PCC merely needs to premeditate four switching states in each sampling interval to achieve the improvement. In addition, as opposed to [1] that requires stator current detections twice in each sampling interval, the proposed method only needs to do so once. To the best of authors´ knowledge, this is the first time of SMFPCC been carried out through a 32-bit microcontroller, TMS320LF2809, to the SynRM drive system. The experimental results show that the proposed SMFPCC performs better than the MBPCC does in terms of the current tracking.