Constraint Satisfaction in Current Control of a Five-Phase Drive with Locally Tuned Predictive Controllers

The problem of control of stator currents in multi-phase induction machines has recently been tackled by direct digital model predictive control. Although these predictive controllers can directly incorporate constraints, most reported applications for stator current control of drives do no use this possibility, being the usual practice tuning the controller to achieve the particular compromise solution. The proposal of this paper is to change the form of the tuning problem of predictive controllers so that constraints are explicitly taken into account. This is done by considering multiple controllers that are locally optimal. To illustrate the method, a five-phase drive is considered and the problem of minimizing x − y losses while simultaneously maintaining the switching frequency and current tracking error below some limits is tackled. The experiments showed that the constraint feasibility problem has, in general, no solution for standard predictive control, whereas the proposed scheme provides good tracking performance without violating constraints in switching frequency and at the same time reducing parasitic currents of x − y subspaces.