Artificial Inductance Concept to Compensate Nonlinear Inductance Effects in the Back EMF-Based Sensorless Control Method for PMSM

The back EMF-based sensorless control method is very popular for permanent magnet synchronous machines (PMSMs) in the medium- to high-speed operation range due to its simple structure. In this speed range, the accuracy of the estimated position is mainly affected by the inductance, which varies at different loading conditions due to saturation effects. In this paper, a new concept of using a constant artificial inductance to replace the actual varying machine inductance for position estimation is introduced. This facilitates greatly the analysis of the influence of inductance variation on the estimated position error, and gives a deep insight into this problem. It also provides a simple approach to achieve a globally minimized position error. A proper choice of the artificial machine inductance may reduce the maximum position error by 50% without considering the actual inductance variation in the control algorithm. Analytical and experimental results are given for validating the proposed theory.