Performance Investigation of Rotor Position Estimation Based on HF Voltage Injection for IPMSM with Different Injected Signal Frequencies

Sensorless rotor position estimation for interior permanent magnet synchronous motors (IPMSM) is a very popular topic under investigation. In combination with an inverter designed with wide band gap (WBG) semiconductors, the switching frequency of the inverter can be significantly increased compared to IGBT inverters. With this condition, the frequency of the injected voltage can also be increased, which can open new aspects for the rotor position estimation technique based on high frequency signal injection (HFI-technique). In this paper the performance of the HFI based rotor position estimation technique is investigated using a WBG inverter. On a test bench combined with a field programmable gate array (FPGA) and an inverter consisting of Gallium Nitride (GaN) semiconductors, the frequency of the injected voltage used for HFItechnique can be increased to several <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$kHz$</tex> for the rotor position estimation. Because of the high bandwidth of the FPGA, the well known algorithm for position estimation can be modified and experimentally investigated.