The use of magnetostrictive intelligent sensors for fault tolerant control of induction motors with energy harvesting principle

Asynchronous machines are omnipresent in automated production systems, due to their robustness and ease of use. These electric motors, however, also concede faults (e.g. short-circuit between turns) leading to unplanned stoppages. Defects with their effects are reflected in the magnitudes of the motors, mainly in flux, current, speed and torque. Our research work in this article presents a contribution of a new approach to the fault tolerant control. This simple and efficient method based solely on the measurement of the electrical energy applied by the magnetostrictive material requires expert knowledge in the field of intelligent materials.

In this work, our method is focused on an additive term in the backstepping control that is based on the error of the current during the appearance of the default and the energy recovered by magnetostrictive sensors and the adaptive gain of the Kalman filter. This method improves the performance of backstepping control to maintain the operation despite the appearance of defects. The target is to ensure a minimum performance level of the drive system that is malfunctioning. The obtained results have provided useful information on multiple electrical malfunctions and show the overall performance of this complementary methodology for the fault tolerant control.