Electric Motor Fault Resilience

The detection and mitigation of electric motor faults is vital to the safety and reliability of Urban Air Mobility (UAM) vehicles using electric propulsion. The proposed research aims to advance the state of the art of motor fault resilience research relevant to the NASA Revolutionary Vertical Lift Technology (RVLT) Project in two aspects: (1) develop fault resilience measures appropriate to the motor drive systems used in RVLT, and (2) study the tradeoffs between fault resilience and other motor drive system performance metrics such as weight and efficiency. Phase I research will explore fault resilience measures using analytical methods such as modeling and simulation. The Phase II research will expand the scope of fault resilience measures considered and will validate the research findings with hardware experiments.