Very low speed and zero speed estimations of sensorless induction motor drives

Recently, speed sensorless control of induction motor drives received great attention to avoid the different problems associated with direct speed sensors. However, low speed operation with robustness against parameter variations remains an area of research for sensorless systems. Stator resistance is of utmost importance for good operation of speed sensorless systems in low speed region. In this paper, a sliding mode current observer for an induction motor is presented. An estimation algorithm based on this observer in conjunction with Popov's hyper-stability theory is proposed to calculate the speed and stator resistance independently. The proposed speed observer with parallel stator resistance identification is first verified by simulation. Experimental results are included as well as to demonstrate the good performance of the proposed observer and estimation algorithms at very low and zero speeds.