Multiphase PMSMs are widely used in faulttolerant control applications. And one of the important faulttolerant control problems is fault diagnosis. In most existing references, the fault diagnosis always focuses on three-phase PMSM. In this paper, a novel model and a fault diagnosis method of inter-turn short circuit (ITSC) fault for five-phase PMSM based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) are presented. There are two contributions in this paper: 1) By analyzing the physical parameters of the PMSM, such as resistance, inductance and flux, the mathematic model of ITSC fault for five-phase PMSM is established. 2) A parameter estimation method based on PSO algorithm, which introduces a fitness function related to the ITSC ratio and reformulates the fault parameters identification problem as the extreme seeking problem, is proposed to track the actual ITSC ratio and detect the fault level for five-phase PMSM. Simulation results provide preliminary verification of the proposed model and fault diagnosis method.