An alternative scheme to reduce torque ripple and mechanical vibration in direct torque controlled permanent magnet synchronous motor

The direct torque control (DTC) technique of a permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) has received increasing attention due to its simplicity and robust dynamic response compared with other control techniques. The classical switching table based DTC presents large flux, torque ripples and more mechanical vibrations in the motor. Several studies have been reported in the literature on classical DTC. However, the studies that actually discuss or evaluate the classical DTC are limited. This paper proposes, an alternative DTC method/switching table for PMSM, to reduce flux and torque ripples as well as mechanical vibrations. This is achieved by a simple modification in the classical DTC structure, by eliminating the two level inverter available in the classical DTC and replacing it with a three level neutral point clamped inverter. To further improve the performance of the proposed DTC, the available 27 voltage vectors are allowed to form different groups of voltage vectors such as Large - Zero, Medium - Zero and Small - Zero. Based on these groups, a new switching table is proposed. The proposed DTC is compared with the classical DTC and existing literature from the aspects of theory analysis and computer simulations. It can be observed that the proposed technique can significantly reduce the flux, torque ripples, and mechanical vibrations and improves the quality of current waveform compared with traditional and existing methods.