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This paper presents a summary of a Honeywell collaborative IR&D project with University of Toronto on current arc fault detection and protection (AFDP) circuits and systems for the aerospace industry. Arc fault detection and protection pose a significant challenge for airlines, aircraft manufacturers, the military, and regulatory agencies such as the FAA. Most of the AFDP research and technology development efforts to date have concentrated on the detection of parallel arc faults because of the ease of differentiating them from other operating conditions due to their high energy levels and potential for serious damage. In contrast, series arc fault currents are limited by the electrical load and are thus more difficult to detect.

This paper presents a summary of a university based research project sponsored by Honeywell for the development of sensorless control method for Brushless DC (BLDC) motors for industrial and aerospace applications. In particular, the development, test results and assessment of an advanced cost effective sensorless BLDC motor controller for aerospace applications are presented and discussed in detail. The motor is controlled by the method of detecting the back EMF instead of the usage of the rotor position or speed sensors. The implemented embedded controls utilize an ASIC with the main objective of enhancing reliability, fault-tolerance, power density and performance.

This paper presents a summary of a Honeywell collaborative IR&D project for advanced motor controls to identify Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) gating patterns and control strategies that would provide an optimum solution in terms of overall inverter efficiency, maximum inverter utilization, ease of implementation and EMI/C performance with minimum filtering requirements. In particular, critical design issues of several different PWM gating patterns are discussed in detail with respect to different types of motor loads, minimum DC bus voltage requirements, input/output (i.e., DC and AC) voltage and current harmonics, maximum inverter switching frequency, sampling/update rate, inverter power losses and overall efficiency, power component and filter design, and finally simplicity of hardware and software implementation. Simulation results are provided for the assessment and comparison of these PWM patterns.

This paper presents a summary of a Honeywell collaborative IR&D project for development of a high-performance sensorless method for a Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor (PMSM) based on Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). The parameters of a high speed 90kW industrial PMSM is employed for validating the proposed sensorless method through simulation. The simulation results demonstrate that the sensorless PMSM drive can work satisfactorily over the whole speed range with full torque and speed control accuracy. With the proposed flux linkage estimator, the new sensorless PMSM drive exhibits robustness against machine parameter variations. Good performance is obtained even when the stator resistance is changed by 200%, or the flux linkage is weakened by 20%. Detailed design and modeling of the sensorless PMSM drive are described in this paper.