Manuscript received 29 April, 2010; revised 6 July, 2010 and 24 September, 2010.The authors are with the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield S1 3JD U. K. (email: k.hoang@sheffield.ac.uk; k.d.hoang@ieee.org; z.q.zhu@sheffield.ac.uk; z.q.zhu@ieee.org; m.p.foster@sheffield.ac.uk).Digital Object Identifier
I. INTRODUCTIONIRECT torque and indirect torque control techniques are two common methodologies for controlling permanent magnet brushless AC machine [1], [2]. Normally, a sixswitch three-phase (SSTP) inverter [Fig. 1(a)] is used for high performance operation of a three-phase machine and is almost universally considered the industry standard. For economic reasons, however, reducing the cost of the inverter is still under investigation and one obvious way to achieve this aim is to decrease the number of inverter switching devices.Low cost inverter topologies with reduced number of switching devices for an induction machine drive system has been suggested and demonstrated in [3] and [4]. Welchko et al. [3] proposed using a three-switch three-phase inverter with an extra connection from neutral point to DC link mid-point to control torque and speed of an induction machine. Although this reduces the number of active switching devices, it requires modifications of both DC link and a specialized machine stator winding structure. A further disadvantage of this topology is that three phase currents are unidirectional and, hence, this topology is limited to particular applications. In [4] a fourswitch three-phase (FSTP) inverter [Fig. 1(b)] was presented where one of three phase machine terminals was connected to the DC link mid-point and control achieved by manipulating the voltages and currents of the two active phases. The performance of this inverter was comparable to the traditional SSTP inverter. However, machines controlled by a FSTP inverter could only achieve half rated speed due to the fact that the voltage vector value is decreased by a factor of two in comparison with that in a conventional SSTP inverter drive system [5]. It should be noted that for an induction machine 2 drive system, reconfiguration of the windings from star to delta connection can allow full-speed operation [4]. Reduction in high order harmonic currents flowing in the mid-point connected phase current can be seen as a further benefit of the FSTP inverter topology. Other investigations on the FSTP inverter topology include the minimisation of torque ripple by applying space vector modulation schemes [6], the application of pulse width modulation (PWM) control methodologies to improve scalar PWM performance and DC link imbalance [7], and the elimination of current distortion at low-speed operation caused by the limited values of DC link capacitors using a compensation strategy [8]; it was also demonstrated that current waveforms under high-speed and inertial load conditions remain naturally balanced and sinusoidal without compensation [8].Reliability improvement and fault tolerance...