Field oriented control reduces motor size,

cost and power consumption in industrial

applications
Kedar Godbole, Texas Instruments - September 23, 2006
Variable speed drives that drive three phase motors are ubiquitous components of
industrial machines that help save energy and optimize systems. Traditional scalar
control techniques for variable speed operation of three phase electric motors offer
simple implementation but limit the performance that can be achieved. With a
scalar drive, algorithm limitations can mean that meeting dynamic response
specifications requires choosing a larger motor and a larger drive that complements
the larger motor.
This tends to drag down the efficiency while resulting in a more expensive system.
Field oriented control (FOC) overcomes this problem by squeezing out more
performance out of the same motor. This allows designers to properly size motors
and drives, lowering cost and results in a more efficient system overall.
Limitations of traditional scalar control
Electric motors are a prime mover of choice, and account for over half of U.S.
electricity consumption, so the potential cost and energy savings through increasing
the performance and efficiency of electric motors used in industrial applications is
significant. Most of the motors in variable-speed drives are alternating current (AC)
induction motors. Scalar control is based on a very simple control strategy: the
voltage and frequency applied to the motor is changed to change the speed of the
motor.
To run the motor at various frequencies, the frequency of the three-phase sinusoidal
drive is varied, and the voltage applied to the motor is varied in proportion. This
changes the speed of the rotating magnetic flux in the motor, and in turn changes
the speed of the machine. This results in a rotating magnetic field, rotating at the
synchronous speed, typically 1800 rpm or 3600 rpm for 2 pole or 4 pole per phase
machines with 60Hz excitation.
These motors operate relatively efficiently at the synchronous speed when the
voltage drop across the stator is nominal. For example, to reduce the operating
speed to say half the nominal speed for a 208V/60Hz, 1800 rpm machine, the
frequency would change to 30Hz and the voltage to 104V. This would result in the
machine running at 900 rpm.

A significant number of industrial applications benefit greatly from variable speed

operation, and variable speed drives are increasingly adopted in a large variety of
industrial equipment. Since in a constant V/F control there is no overt effort to
maintain the alignment between the stator and rotor flux, oscillations and current
spikes can occur during rapid transients. An aggressive speed regulator might
accelerate the stator flux too quickly, disturbing the flux alignment in the machine.
This may actually reduce the instantaneous torque produced, and also temporarily
reduce the back-emf in the motor windings, resulting in a current inrush. In an open
loop operation scenario, the induction machine self aligns to a new equilibrium.
With an aggressive closed loop speed regulator this mechanism results in torque
and current oscillations.
One way to avoid these transients is to limit the transient demands. To do this the
regulator may be detuned, limiting performance. Another option can be to use a
larger machine, with a higher torque capability. The larger machine may indeed
allow the system to respond to the transient though it follows that with scalar
control driving a larger motor, the power converters may need to be oversized to
handle the torque requirements of the transient and surge currents.
Field oriented control basics
The basic idea behind the field oriented control is to manage the interrelationship of
the fluxes to avoid the issues mentioned above, and to squeeze out the most
performance from the motor. To understand how this works, we first look at the
structure of the motor. A three-phase motor incorporates windings that are displaced
by 120 degrees (or a fraction of that) along the stator. Feeding the windings with
three voltages separated in phase by one-third of a cycle produces a rotating
magnetic field. A conceptual representation is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Generation of a rotating magnetic field and torque in an induction

machine.
The rotor in an induction machine consists of a closed circuit. Most often, a squirrel
cage rotor is used, which has conductor bars shorted together with thick end rings.
When the stator magnetic field sweeps the rotor, an emf is induced in the rotor
circuit, and produces a current. The current produces its own magnetic field, and
this induced magnetic field interacts with the stator magnetic field to producing
mechanical force upon the rotor.
Force coupling
These mechanical forces form a force couple, since the direction of force produced
is opposite on opposite sides of the rotor, and result in a mechanical torque upon
the rotor. Figure 2 shows the interaction of the fluxes. The torque produced is
proportional to the product of the magnitudes of the fluxes, and the sine of the
angle between them. This relationship is expressed in the second of the diagrams in
Figure 2.

Figure 2: Flux vectors, Torque and Load Angle.

To implement the basic principle of FOC, i.e. to maintain a desired alignment
between the stator flux and rotor flux. To do this, it is necessary to control the stator
currents that produce the stator flux. An angle closer 90o produces more flux per
unit current.
To control three sinusoidal currents is considerably more complex, and moreover, it
is not actually necessary to control three sinusoidal currents. The problem is
simplified by first using the Clark and Parke transforms to perform a two-step
transformation on the stator currents. The first is from a three phase to a two phase
system with the Clarke transform, and then translating them into the rotor reference
frame with the Park Transform.

The instantaneous currents in the stator phases are denoted as ia, ib and ic,
corresponding to the a, b and c phases. These phases can be considered as a three
axis reference frame in a planar system. Of course, in a planar system, there are
only two degrees of freedom, and only two independent vectors are possible. Any
additional quantities can be expressed as a linear combination. The Clarke
transform converts the 3-axis coordinates into 2 axis orthogonal coordinates (Ia,
Ib). The formulas that generate this transformation are:
Next, the Park transform is used to convert the fixed coordinates into 2-axis
rotating coordinates (Id, Iq). The reference coordinates d (flux) and q (torque) and
the reference frame align the d axis with the rotor flux position . The two
equations defining the flux and torque components of the stator current vector are:
This enables the controllers to generate voltages to be applied to the stator to
maintain the desired current vectors in the so-called rotor referenced frame. The
voltage command is then transformed back by the inverse Park and Clarke
transform to voltage commands in the abc stator referenced frame, so that each
phase can be excited via the power converter.
Regulating Id and Iq with PI controllers
In steady state Id and Iq consist of fairly constant values with some transient
components depending on load and torque ripples, errors and imbalances. These are
now of a suitable form for regulation with a proportional integral (PI) controller.
Software implemented proportional and integral (PI) controls regulate the torque
producing and magnetizing components of the imaginary stator current vector. A
speed regulator block, which can also be a PI regulator, produces a torque
command to run the machine at a given speed, the speed set-point. The speed
regulator acts upon the set-point and the measured speed, to produce the torque
command. If the machine is rotating below the set speed, the PI regulator
commands a larger torque to increase the speed, and if above the set speed, a
smaller torque is commanded, slowing down the machine.
FOC enables optimal systems
With field oriented control it is also possible to totally reverse the power flow to
brake the machine. In such a case, power will be drawn out of the load, and the
machine will act as a generator, transferring energy back to the load. The power
converter must, of course, support such operation, and use either an inverter to feed
energy back to the line, or use a resistor to burn off the energy to prevent the bus
voltage from rising in an uncontrolled manner.
In a typical industrial application, the improved dynamic behavior enabled by FOC
also enables designers to size the motors optimally, rather than oversize the motor
to meet the transient requirements. A smaller motor also runs at a higher fraction of

its power rating, meaning that the resulting operating point is suited to provide
better efficiency.
Most types of industrial machinery uses AC induction motors, so the overall
savings can represent a substantial reduction in energy costs. Reductions in energy
consumption can result in a substantial reduction in operating costs for nearly any
industrial plant. Having a motor control platform that is reprogrammable in
software also allows for easy tweaking of systems to increase efficiency or enable
system re-use with different motor types.

Figure 3: Field Oriented Control Scheme.

Click here for larger image
Meeting the computational demands of FOC
FOC, however, places larger computational requirements on the processor. The
computational requirements exceed the capability of most common
microcontrollers (MCU) to execute the required algorithm functions executed in
software. The high end floating point processors are an option, but are too
expensive for anything other than the biggest of variable speed drives.
The advent of the latest generation of signal processors that are optimized for the
mathematical computations such as digital signal processors (DSP), also known as
digital signal controllers, has made it much less expensive and simpler to
implement FOC. DSP-based controllers such as Texas Instruments TMS320F28x
devices deliver very powerful number crunching cores with up to 60-150 MIPS of
performance, enabling designers to implement the reference frame translations and
control law implementations at high sample rates, which in turn results in very high
current loop bandwidths.
These high control bandwidths help meet challenges such as fast servo response
times and enable very precise control of transients. The bus architecture of the DSP

enables efficient movement of data to and from the high performance, single-cycle
multiply-and-accumulate processing cores.
These control oriented DSPs are built around computation adept processor cores,
and integrate peripherals as well. Control-specific peripherals such as pulse-width
modulators, communication ports and analog-to-digital converters help designers
avoid external components and reduce system cost. Integration of large amounts of
on-chip memory eliminates external flash/RAM devices, additionally reducing cost
and complexity.
When vector control was first deployed with digital microprocessors, the challenge
of writing assembly code to implement complex algorithms while maintaining
required performance and code size was a serious impediment to quick and
efficient development. Today's DSP compilers have advanced to the point where
writing assembly code is now rarely required, and most mathematical functions can
be written directly in a C environment.
DSP manufacturers have off the shelf C libraries that provide many of the functions
required for vector control, such as Park and Clarke transformations, PWMs, PI
control loops, etc. Motor control designers need only to tweak the code to fit the
application at hand, integrate the modules and test the code.
In conclusion, modern motor control techniques provide closer control over the
entire torque generation process, resulting in better dynamic performance, optimal
motor sizing and a more efficient system. The implementation of such systems is
simplified by modern digital signal controllers which can perform the numerically
intensive calculations in real time.
These developments offer the end user drives that perform better and are more
efficient than drives based on traditional scale control. End equipment
manufacturers are also leveraging the spare processing power of the DSP to add in
advanced features to their equipment, driving differentiation.
About the author Kedar Godbole is a C2000 Digital Signal Controller Applications
engineer at Texas Instruments Advanced Embedded Control (AEC) Group. He
earned his Master of Science degree in Embedded Systems and Control from the
New Jersey Institute of Technology.