This paper deals with the optimal fault-tolerant operation of a 5-phase permanent magnet (PM) brushless DC (BLDC) drive. In particular, this paper (Part I) proposes the modelization used to optimize the motor current supply to obtain the maximum power in healthy conditions and its analytical solution is presented. In the companion paper (Part II) the drive is considered both in healthy and faulty conditions and the optimization problem is solved numerically. In all cases the solution is compared with the one obtained with a “Maximum Torque Per Ampere” objective.
