In the field of sensorless drive of synchronous machines (SMs), many techniques have been proposed that can be applied successfully in most applications. Nevertheless, these techniques rely on the measurement of the phase currents to extract the rotor position information. In the particular case of low-power machines, the application of such techniques is challenging due to the limited bandwidth of the available current sensors. An alternative is offered by those techniques that exploit the star-point voltage rather than phase currents. This work aims at providing a model of the dynamic behavior of the star-point voltage and presenting a technique for extracting the rotor electrical position needed for sensorless operation of SMs. Two different circuitries for measuring the star-point voltage are also presented and then compared. The presented mathematical analysis and the measurement methods are validated both numerically and experimentally on a test machine.

Self sensing techniques allow the use of a piezoelectric transducer simultaneously as an actuator and as a sensor. Such techniques are based on knowledge of the transducer behaviour and on measurements of electrical quantities, in particular voltage and charge. Past research work has mainly considered the linear behaviour of piezoelectric transducers, consequently restricting the operating driving voltages to low values. In this work a new self sensing technique is proposed which is able to perform self sensing reconstruction both at low and at high driving voltages. This technique, in fact, makes use of a hysteretic model to describe the nonlinear piezoelectric capacitance necessary for self sensing reconstruction. The capacitance can be measured and identified at the antiresonances of a vibrating structure with a good approximation. After providing a mathematical background to deal with the main aspects of self sensing, this technique is compared theoretically and experimentally to a typical linear one by using an aluminum plate with one bonded self sensing transducer and a positive position feedback (PPF) controller to verify the performance in self sensing based vibration control.

Techniques for estimating the plunger position have successfully proven to support operation and monitoring of electromagnetic actuators without the necessity of additional sensors. Sophisticated techniques in this field make use of an oversampled measurement of the rippled driving current in order to reconstruct the position. However, oversampling algorithms place high demands on AD converters and require significant computational effort which are not desirable in low-cost actuation systems. Moreover, such low-cost actuators are affected by eddy currents and parasitic capacitances, which influence the current ripple significantly. Therefore, in this work, those current ripples are modeled and analyzed extensively taking into account those effects. The Integrator-Based Direct Inductance Measurement (IDIM) technique, used for processing the current ripples, is presented and compared experimentally to an oversampling technique in terms of noise robustness and implementation effort. A practical use case scenario in terms of a sensorless end-position detection for a switching solenoid is discussed and evaluated. The obtained results prove that the IDIM technique outperforms oversampling algorithms under certain conditions in terms of noise robustness, thereby requiring less sampling and calculation effort. The IDIM technique is shown to provide a robust position estimation in low-cost applications as in the presented example involving a end-position detection.

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In this paper, the design procedure of an electric vehicle (EV) wireless charger is presented. Unlike most of the systems available in the literature, the proposed charging system is regulated from the vehicle side. The on-board electrical circuit automatically adapts the resonant compensation to guarantee compatibility with the primary inverter characteristics and achieve high transmission efficiency without communication between sides. Moreover, the proposed control strategy, used to regulate the secondary full active rectifier (FAR), allows the supply of the the EV battery, maximizing the efficiency during the whole charging process.