Efficiency Evaluation of Five-Phase Outer-Rotor Fault-Tolerant BLDC Drives under Healthy and Open-Circuit Faulty Conditions

Abstract

Fault tolerant motor drives are an interesting subject for many applications such as automotive industries and wind power generation. Among different configurations of these systems, five-phase BLDC drives are gaining more importance which is because of their compactness and high efficiency. Due to replacement of field windings by permanent magnets in their rotor structure, the main sources of power losses in these drives are iron (core) losses, copper (winding) losses, and inverter unit (semiconductor) losses. Although low amplitude of power losses in five-phase BLDC drives is an important aspect for many applications, but their efficiency under faulty conditions is not considered in previous studies. In this paper, the efficiency of an outer-rotor five phase BLDC drive is evaluated under normal and different faulty conditions. Open-circuit fault is considered for one, two adjacent and two non-adjacent faulty phases. Iron core losses are calculated via FEM simulations in Flux-Cedrat® software, and moreover, inverter losses and winding copper losses are simulated in MATLAB® environment. Experimental evaluations are conducted to evaluate the efficiency of the entire BLDC drive which verifies the theoretical developments.