Cascaded Model Predictive Control of Six-Phase Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor with Fault Tolerant Ability

In the field of high-power electric drives, multiphase motors have the advantages of high power-density, excellent fault tolerance and control flexibility. But their decoupling control and modulation process are much more complicated compared with three-phase motors due to the increased degree of freedom. Finite control set model predictive control can reduce the difficulties of controlling six-phase motors because it does not require modulation process. In this paper, a cascaded model predictive control strategy is proposed for the optimal control of high-power six-phase permanent magnet synchronous motors. Firstly, the current prediction model of torque and harmonic subspaces are established by decoupling the six-phase spatial variables. Secondly, a cascaded cost function with fault-tolerant capability is proposed to eliminate the weighting factor in the cost function. And finally, the proposed strategy is demonstrated through theoretical analysis and experiments. It is validated that the proposed method is able to maintain excellent steady-state control accuracy and fast dynamic response while significantly reduce the control complexity of the system. Besides, it can easily achieve fault-tolerant operation under open-phase fault.