Predictive control of synchronous reluctance motor drive

A predictive digital control algorithm; suitable for synchronous reluctance motor drives, is presented in the paper. The proposed algorithm, which is a direct digital control one, is implemented in rotor coordinates. It is a recursive algorithm which allows the imposition of the reference values of d and q current components. The digital control system directly synthesizes an output vector which imposes the timing control of the inverter by means of on/off state of the switches, thus avoiding the implementation of the traditional PI controllers and PWM technique. Due to the time required for the execution of the algorithm, the vector control has to be imposed with a delay of one sampling time. This drawback can be overcome by using very fast processors like FPGAs or by introducing the observed quantities instead of the measured ones in the recursive algorithm. Both the delayed control and the latter solution are considered in the paper. A computer simulation study, using the Matlab Simulink tool, is conducted on the drive. The simulation results are compared also with those obtained by simulating the traditional drive. The simulation study and the results comparison show the good performance of the proposed control algorithm.