I would like to express my sincere gratitude to all those who ever gave me a lot of help during the writing of this thesis. My deepest gratitude goes first and foremost to Professor Wang Youyi, my supervisor, for his constant encouragement and guidance. He has guided me in every stage of writing this thesis. This thesis could not have become its present form without his enlightening and consistent instructions. Secondly, I would like to deliver my heartfelt gratitude to Dr. Shawn Liu, who gave me this chance to do this thesis. During these times, he gave me a lot of instructions on directions of this thesis and also provided some important advises on this thesis. I am also greatly indebted to the researcher at Epsil@ntu: Dr. Niu Li, who have instructed and helped me a lot in the past several months. He always welcomed me to consult questions at anytime and gave me very useful suggestions on my work. Finally my thanks would go to my beloved family and friends for their great confidence and loving considerations in me all through these years. I also owe my sincere gratitude to my fellow classmates and my friends who gave me their time and help in listening to me and helping me work out my problems during the difficult times. mooring. The marine winch market was dominated by hydraulic systems and there is a trend to be replaced by more efficient electrical drive system. For both anchoring and mooring control, full load torque is required through the entire speed range including zero speed operation. This poses a challenge for the inverter driven motor control, especially when there is no speed or position sensor. This thesis aims to develop advanced control algorithms of permanent magnet (PM) machine including direct torque control (DTC) and sensorless control for marine winch application. In this thesis, direct torque control, as a new type of high-performance ac driving system after vector control technique, is mainly concerned. Furthermore, since the traditional switch-table based DTC ac motor drive is usually affected by the torque ripple problem and steady-state error problem in torque, this thesis introduced a modified 12-sector DTC control method. The subsystems of traditional DTC system and modified DTC system for permanent magnet synchronous machine (PMSM) are modeled and designed in PSIM software. Then the simulation models of the above two control strategies are also established. Simulation research is conducted and the results are corresponding with theory analysis: the improved system has good dynamic and static performance; less flux and torque ripple especially in the low speed range. The second part of this thesis is to realize sensorless control of DTC control system. Considered the actual situation on board, different methods for high-speed range and lowspeed range are discussed. The rotating high frequency (hf) voltage signal injection as lowspeed sensorless control method is good for its simplicity and better tracking accuracy, while the back-EMF integral as high-speed method is suitable for its ...