Sensor fault-tolerant control of a rail traction drive

Abstract The problem of sensor faults on an AC-drive system for an electric train is considered here. Intermittent disconnections of these sensors produce severe transient errors in the estimator for the control loop. This paper uses a bilinear model of the motors and model-based techniques to produce estimates of control variables that are tolerant to intermittent disconnections, without degrading performance. The paper shows how such a system can be verified in hardware, on a small test-rig with a DSP used to run the fault-tolerant algorithm.