1282 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRY APPLICATIONS, VOL. 38, NO.

5, SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2002

Consideration About Problems and Solutions of

Speed Estimation Method and Parameter
Tuning for Speed-Sensorless Vector
Control of Induction Motor Drives
Hirokazu Tajima, Giuseppe Guidi, Member, IEEE, and Hidetoshi Umida

Abstract—A classical model-based speed-sensorless field-ori-
ented control method for a general-purpose induction machine
is considered. Improved versions of both speed and stator resis-
tance online estimators are presented with the aim of extending
control capabilities down to zero speed. Only electrical stator
measurements are needed, making the method suitable for
general-purpose inverter applications. Online rotor resistance
tuning is also included to fully compensate for thermal drift.
Performance of the proposed drive is investigated by simulation
and experiments.
Index Terms—Induction motor, parameter tuning, speed
estimation, speed sensorless, vector control.
I. INTRODUCTION
The latter limitation has pushed many researchers to
abandon the classical methods for speed estimation and try to
use second-order phenomena, like saturation-induced saliencies
[1]–[4], to make the rotor speed observable regardless of the
fundamental excitation frequency. However, the symmetrical
structure of general-purpose induction machines makes the
tracking of saturation-induced saliency very critical and, what
is more important, such a saliency has been shown to be not
necessarily oriented along the direction of the main flux. In
particular, closed-slot machines show saturation characteristics
which are significantly load dependent.
The above-mentioned problems make these new methods
not very suitable for industrial application to general-purpose
inverters because their possible, although still questionable,

S PEED-SENSORLESS induction motor drives have already

replaced the classical vector-controlled drives equipped
with position and/or speed sensor in most applications where
payoff in the very-low-speed region is easily overtaken by their
low sensitivity in the medium- and high-speed range when
compared to classical methods. A combination of the two
fine position control is not required and the operating range
strategies is also possible, but this will considerably increase
does not include zero or very low speed. The challenge for
the complexity of the system and, therefore, its cost.
the next generation of general-purpose inverters is to include
For more immediate applications, it seems reasonable to
some kind of torque and speed control capabilities down to
work on the well-established model-based sensorless drives,
zero speed.
by means of fine parameter tuning and/or enhanced speed
Evaluating the rotor speed from easy-to-perform electrical
estimation algorithm, in order to extend their operating range,
measurements on the stator is rather easy when the speed is
which is typically not less than 1% of the rated speed for the
significant and so is the resulting counter electromotive force
present generation.
(EMF). However, during low-speed operation, the counter EMF
In this paper, both speed and stator resistance estimation algo-
approaches zero, making speed estimation more and more dif-
rithms are considered. In particular, the speed adaptive law pre-
ficult using the classical voltage–current model of the machine.
sented in [5] and widely used in industrial products is modified
Parameter variations make the task even harder. Moreover, no
to improve its stability during regenerative operation. Also, the
information about rotor quantities is available at the stator when
stator resistance estimation algorithm presented in [6] is modi-
the primary frequency is exactly zero.
fied to enhance its robustness during light-load operation.
The resulting sensorless drive, equipped with both stator and
rotor resistance online tuning, is shown to be able to control
Paper IPCSD 01–040, presented at the 2000 Industry Applications Society
Annual Meeting, Rome, Italy, October 8–12, and approved for publication in zero speed under any load condition. Even though persistent
the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRY APPLICATIONS by the Industrial Drives operation at dc excitation is not possible, the primary frequency
Committee of the IEEE Industry Applications Society. Manuscript submitted can smoothly cross the zero value without detrimental effect on
for review May 1, 2000 and released for publication June 3, 2002.
H. Tajima is with the ED&C Drives Systems Company, Fuji Electric drive stability.
Company, Ltd. Mie 513-8633, Japan (e-mail: tajima-hirokazu@fujielec-
tric.co.jp). II. INDUCTION MOTOR MODEL
G. Guidi was with Fuji Electric Corporate R&D, Ltd., Tokyo 191-8502,
Japan. He is now with SIEI SpA, I-21040 Gerenzano, Italy (e-mail: A standard two-axes model for the induction machine in a
Giuseppe.Guidi@siei.it).
H. Umida is with the Power Electronics Laboratory, Fuji Electric Corporate rotating reference frame is written as follows:
R&D, Ltd., Tokyo 191-8502, Japan (e-mail: umida-hidetoshi@fujielec-
tric.co.jp). (1)
Publisher Item Identifier 10.1109/TIA.2002.802893.

0093-9994/02$17.00 © 2002 IEEE

TAJIMA et al.: SPEED-SENSORLESS VECTOR CONTROL OF INDUCTION MOTOR DRIVES 1283

Fig. 1. Proposed control system.

Fig. 2. Stator current loci for different operating conditions; ! and ! are expressed in radians per second. The arrows indicate the direction of increasing R
for a given couple (! ; ! ); kv k = 0:5 1 ! ; v = v .

where TABLE I
3.7-kW FOUR-POLE 200-V 50-Hz INDUCTION MOTOR PARAMETERS

are, respectively, stator current, rotor flux , and stator voltage.

Matrices in (1) are written as

where and are unit and skew-symmetrical matrices,

respectively,
1284 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRY APPLICATIONS, VOL. 38, NO. 5, SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2002

(a)

(b)
Fig. 3. Simulation results with fixed R (3.7-kW machine).

and IV. ADAPTIVE FLUX OBSERVER

stator and rotor resistance;
Since the model (1) is obviously stable, the simplest full-order
stator, rotor, and mutual inductances;
state observer for the induction machine has the same form of
rotor time constant;
(1)
total leakage coefficient;
primary angular velocity;
rotor electrical angular velocity. (2)

where “ ” denotes observed quantities.

III. SYSTEM OVERVIEW The dynamic matrix in (1), which depends on the param-
eters to be updated online, is replaced by its estimation. The
The block diagram of the proposed system is depicted in augmented observer is, therefore,
Fig. 1. Field orientation is achieved by means of a full-order
adaptive observer. Estimated parameters are the rotor speed
(speed-sensorless drive) and both stator and rotor resistances,
in order to compensate for their thermal drift during operation.
Only stator current is measured. The stator voltage can either (3)
be measured or estimated from the dc-link voltage and the
switching state of the inverter, depending on the required
accuracy [10].
The contribution of this paper is the development of new algo- where , and are the adaptive laws for
rithms for speed estimation and online stator resistance tuning, stator and rotor resistances, respectively, and is the adaptive
which allow low-speed and standstill operation. law for the rotor speed.
TAJIMA et al.: SPEED-SENSORLESS VECTOR CONTROL OF INDUCTION MOTOR DRIVES 1285

(a)

(b)
Fig. 4. Simulation results with R online tuning (3.7-kW machine).

V. IMPROVEMENT OF SPEED ESTIMATION However, the second term of (4) includes the actual rotor flux
which is not measurable. Simply neglecting that term leads to
From (1) and (2), considering the resistances constant and
an algorithm which is widely used for speed estimation
known, and using the Lyapunov’s theorem, a globally stable
speed estimation algorithm can be obtained [5]
(5)

(4) This algorithm, although stable and robust in most operating

conditions, may fail during regeneration, as reported in [7]. We
where propose an improved speed estimation method given by

(6)

is the current observation error, is the cross product of vectors, where is a positive gain, and and are magnetizing
and is the time constant of the integrator. and torque current, respectively. Magnetizing current estimation
1286 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRY APPLICATIONS, VOL. 38, NO. 5, SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2002
TABLE II
7.5-kW FOUR-POLE 200-V 50-Hz INDUCTION MOTOR PARAMETERS
(a)
(b)
Fig. 5. Experimental results with R online tuning (3.7-kW machine). Speed
0
reference: 150 r/min; load torque: 100%.
error is used instead of the unmeasurable flux error in (3) as
an attempt to improve the stability margin during regeneration.
Simulation analysis has shown that the sign of this additional
term is to be changed according to the direction of rotation of
the current vector. Variable gain according to the load level of
the machine also improves estimation performance.
VI. ONLINE RESISTANCES ESTIMATION
A. Stator Resistance Estimation
A stator resistance estimation algorithm based only on stator
current measurements was proposed in [6]
(7)
(a)
(b)
Fig. 6. Experimental results; zero frequency crossing (7.5-kW machine). Load
+
torque: 80%.
is a phasor that, assuming the real axis is oriented with the
stator voltage phasor, can be expressed as
(8)
where is the nominal magnetizing current of the motor. Fig. 2
shows the relationship between the point and the stator cur-
rent loci for variations, giving also a graphical explanation
for the convergence of (7).
Convergence of this algorithm has been proved in the case of
measurable speed for any load condition. However, when ap-
plied to speed-sensorless drives there are some problems if the
load is not sufficiently high. In fact, if the motor is unloaded,
it is possible to demonstrate that speed and primary resistance
detunings affect the stator current estimated by (2) in exactly
the same way and, therefore, simultaneous estimation of those
parameters is not possible. An improved version is, therefore,
developed [9], given by
(9)
TAJIMA et al.: SPEED-SENSORLESS VECTOR CONTROL OF INDUCTION MOTOR DRIVES 1287

(a) (b)

(c)
Fig. 7. Experimental results; steady-state characteristics (7.5-kW machine). Load torque: +100%.

where the first term inside brackets is the original adaptive law,
while the second term, active at light load ( is the nom-
inal torque current), is added to increase the stability margin.
Due to the theoretical limitation cited above, the stator resis-
tance cannot be tuned at no load, but the minimum allowable
load for reliable estimation is significantly improved by using
the modified version (9).
B. Rotor Resistance Estimation
A rotor resistance estimation algorithm was proposed in [8].
Since it is known that rotor resistance cannot be identified inde-
pendently from the speed in steady state, an additional harmonic
is added on the magnetizing current command
(10)
where is the amplitude of the harmonic component. The
injected frequency should be small enough so that the related
skin effect is negligible.
It may be shown [8] that, by properly choosing the injected
frequency, there is a unique relationship between the magnitude
of the harmonic magnetizing current and the rotor resistance.
This allows us to write the following simple adaptive law:
(11)
where is a positive gain and and are, respectively,
the measured and observed harmonic components of the mag-
netizing current.
VII. SIMULATION RESULTS
The system of Fig. 1 has been simulated using SIMULINK.
Motor parameters are those listed in Table I (3.7-kW general-
purpose induction motor).
Fig. 3 shows the result of a 100%, regenerative load impact.
In this simulation, and online tunings are not activated
and actual stator resistance is 3% bigger than the value used by
the controller; speed reference is set to 150 r/min. When the con-
ventional algorithm (5) is used for speed estimation, the system
is unstable after the load torque is applied [Fig. 3(a)]. However,
using the proposed speed estimator (6), the drive is stable under
1288 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRY APPLICATIONS, VOL. 38, NO. 5, SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2002

the same conditions [Fig. 3(b)], although a small steady-state

error is present on the speed due to the resistance detuning.
Fig. 4 shows the simulated behavior of the drive with stator
resistance adaptation enabled. Speed reference and load torque
are the same as in the previous case. Actual stator resistance
is 20% bigger than its initial value in the controller. When
using conventional speed estimation, the system is unstable
[Fig. 4(a)]. However, using the proposed speed estimation,
the drive is stable under the same conditions [Fig. 4(b)] and
both speed and estimated stator resistance converge toward
the desired value with no steady-state error.

VIII. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS

A. Load Torque Response
The proposed drive has been experimentally tested, using a (a)
floating-point digital signal processor (DSP) for the calculation
of speed and current regulators, state observer, and parameter
estimator. Two kinds of general-purpose induction machine,
rated, respectively, at 3.7 and 7.5 kW, whose parameters are
given in Tables I and II, were considered. An insulated-gate-
bipolar-transistor (IGBT)-based pulsewidth modulation (PWM)
inverter was used to generate the variable voltage-variable
frequency input. The load torque was generated by an ac
servo motor coupled with the tested machine. In the 7.5-kW
setup, both stator voltage and current are measured, while in
the 3.7-kW setup only the current is measured and the stator
voltage is evaluated from the dc-link voltage and switching
state of the inverter. The speed signal from an optical encoder
is used only for verification.
Experimental results in Fig. 5 are related to the same con-
dition of the simulation presented in Fig. 4. online tuning
is activated. Speed reference and load torque are, respectively,
150 r/min and 100%). Actual stator resistance is 20% bigger (b)
than its initial value in the controller. When using conventional Fig. 8. Experimental results; effect of motor heating (7.5-kW machine). Load
speed estimation [Fig. 5(a)], the system is unstable and overcur- +
torque: 100%.
rent trip occurs after load impact. However, using the proposed
speed estimation [Fig. 5(b)], the drive is stable under the same C. Effect of Motor Heating
conditions. Notice the very good agreement between simulation
and experimental results. The main purpose of online resistance estimation
is to compensate for motor heating. In fact, during
B. Zero-Frequency-Crossing Operation low-speed–high-torque operation, both stator and rotor
resistances directly influence speed estimation. This fact is
Fig. 6 shows the behavior of the drive for slow zero frequency clearly seen in Fig. 8(a), where a mere 12 C of temperature
crossing with heavy load (80%, 7.5-kW machine). In this case, variation causes a speed error of about 6.5 r/min on the tested
rotor resistance tuning is disabled to avoid the modulating term 7.5-kW machine loaded at its rated if resistance variation is not
on the stator current which would make zero frequency crossing compensated.
less evident. online tuning is enabled. The speed follows In the same condition, the use of the proposed online tuning
its reference value and no difference can be noticed between algorithms for both stator and rotor resistances reduces the
driving and braking operation. Fig. 6(a) shows the case of for- speed drift to less than 0.5 r/min, which is a very remarkable
ward (driving) to reverse (braking); Fig. 6(b) shows the case of result.
reverse (braking) to forward (driving).
In Fig. 7, steady-state characteristics are highlighted. Both
IX. CONCLUSION
and online estimations are enabled in correspondence
of the speed step. The load torque is fixed to 100% (7.5-kW It has been shown how the conventional voltage–cur-
machine). Notice that the resistance estimators converge toward rent-model-based speed-sensorless drive can have its perfor-
values which tend to reduce the steady-state error on the speed. mance significantly enhanced by providing an effective online
In Fig. 7(c), the same experiment is carried out without online tuning for resistive parameters and by slightly modifying the
tuning and the resulting steady-state speed error is evident. speed estimation algorithm.
TAJIMA et al.: SPEED-SENSORLESS VECTOR CONTROL OF INDUCTION MOTOR DRIVES
Zero speed can be successfully controlled regardless of the
load and even zero frequency can be approached without losing
stability. Persistent operation at zero frequency is not possible,
but stable crossing is very well possible, even at a reasonably
slow rate.
The proposed drive can compete with a speed-sensor-
equipped drive if continuous operation at ac excitation and
high load is not required and speed control accuracy can be
somewhat loose around standstill.
Further investigation is going on to increase the speed and
torque control accuracy and enhance the overall stability around
the theoretical unobservable point.
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Annu. Meeting, San Diego, CA, 1996, pp. 270–277.
[3] A. Consoli, G. Scarcella, and A. Testa, “A new zero frequency flux posi-
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Hirokazu Tajima was born in Tokyo, Japan, in 1967.
He received the B.E. and M.E. degrees in electrical
engineering from The University of Tokyo, Tokyo,
Japan, in 1990 and 1992, respectively.
In 1992, he joined Fuji Electric Corporate R&D
Ltd., Tokyo, Japan. Since April 2000, he has been
with Fuji Electric Company, Ltd., Mie, Japan. His re-
search interests are control theory and its application
to motor drives.
Mr. Tajima is a member of the Institute of Elec-
trical Engineers of Japan.
Giuseppe Guidi (M’00) was born in Rieti, Italy, in
1970. He received the “Laurea” degree in electrical
engineering from the University of L’Aquila,
L’Aquila, Italy.
During 1996, he was a Cooperative Researcher
at The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan. In 1998,
he joined Fuji Electric Corporate R&D, Ltd., Tokyo,
Japan. Since 2001, he has been with SIEI SpA,
Gerenzano, Italy. His research interests include
power electronics and control of high-performance
drives.
Hidetoshi Umida was born in Hiroshima, Japan, in
1956. He received the B.E., M.E., and Ph.D. degrees
in electrical engineering from Tokyo Institute of
Technology, Tokyo, Japan, in 1979, 1981, and 1984,
respectively.
Since April 1984, he has been with Fuji Electric
Corporate R&D, Ltd., Tokyo, Japan. His research in-
terests are control theory and its application to motor
drives.
Dr. Umida is a member of the Institute of Electrical
Engineers of Japan.