Sensor fault-tolerant control of a rail traction drive

The problem of sensor faults on an AC-drive system for an electric train is considered here. Intermittent disconnections of these sensors produce seve re transient errors in the estimator for the control loop. This paper uses a bilinear model of the motors and model-based techniques to produce estima tes of control variables that are tolerant to intermittent disconnections, without degrading performance. The paper shows how such a system can be ver ified in hardware, on a small test-rig with a DSP used to run the fault-tol erant algorithm. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.