Dependence of IPMSM Motor Efficiency on Parameter Estimates

The efficiency of an IPMSM motor is influenced by the operating point of the machine. Conventional approaches to generate measured efficiency maps may be too expensive to use in some situations, thus it often replaced by simpler variants based on parametric models. A promising approach is to combine model-based approaches with online parameter identification methods which would allow following changes of the parameters. However, such approaches may also result in deteriorated performance if the online parameter estimation is inaccurate. We present a systematic experimental study of the influence of the parameter estimates on the efficiency of a 4.5 kW IPMSM drive and analyze the sources of inaccuracy. The first outcome of this study is that none of the tested methods performs well when the machine is fully loaded, which deteriorates overall performance. The second outcome is that the conventional maximum torque per ampere/current (MTPA/MTPC) is not an accurate optimization criterion. The overall performance of the compared methods thus heavily depends on the testing profile. When a significant part of the profile is at full load, the methods based on online estimation are unsuitable and parameters estimated offline using frequency domain provides better efficiency under the maximum torque per current control strategy.