Title: - Speed Control of High-Performance Brushless DC Motor Drives by Load Torque

Estimation
Authors: - Ki-Hong Park, Tae-Sung Kim, Sung-Chan Ahn, Dong-Seok Hyun
Department of Electrical Engineering,
HanYang University,
HaengDang Dong, SungDong Gu,
SEOUL KOREA 133-79 1
Summary: Small size not affecting the overall performance and reliability of a BLDC motor
makes it a powerful and must wanted device in modern industrial field in speed drive systems.
As the sentence suggests BLDC used as speed drivers, a high speed control gain is
advantageous in a system but this cannot make a system stable with lower stiffness. In general,
PI is used to control the speed of the BLDC due to its simplicity but lags in performance and
hence a high performance method is presented in this article to control the speed of BLDC
motor by observing the load torque. The motor used in the system is BLDC whose parameters
are presented in Table I. It has a three winding stator and permanent magnet rotor where
unsaturated motor with negligible iron loss, equal stator resistance, constant inductances and
ideal inverter is assumed. The author has presented a control system for the speed control
where the load torque estimated is forward feed to the system. The value of the reference
current is calculated from the Fourier series summation method. The load torque is computed
using state observer since direct measurement will add up the system cost for new devices. An
expression is derived in the article that gives the vector of a state observer. It includes speed of
the rotor its position and load torque. The proposed system is simulated and observations are
analyzed by plotting speed of the motor against time with controlled and uncontrolled system by
changing load torque and parameters like viscous damping and moments of inertia.
Major Conclusion: The feed forward compensator with disturbance torque observer is
proposed for robust speed control of high performance BLDC which consists of a system with PI
controller, state observer that takes rotor position as input, a BLDC motor, an inverter and a
phase converter. The PI controller calculates error value as the difference between the
estimated load torque and desired torque and sets the reference current. A state observer
estimates the load torque. Reference current is compensated by the current calculated from
estimated load torque which compensates the load disturbance in the system. This proposed
method will increase the servo stiffness without increasing the speed control gain. This
proposed system is verified by observing the results of simulation. The simulation shows that
the desired speed of the motor is achieved within a short period of time after startup by
recovering from load torque disturbance when proposed control mechanism is used while in
case of uncontrolled system the reference speed isnt achieved. When the parameters are
changed the stabilization doesnt affect for the controlled system while for the uncontrolled
system desired speed is not achieved. This proves that the change in parameters and increased
load torque will not affect the performance of the speed driver proposed in this article. There is
no need of increasing the control gain to achieve robust speed characteristics for a high
performance BLDC motor.

Major points related:

With this proposed control system speed of the motor can be controlled without
increasing the speed controller gain which is useful for system having low stiffness.
Very useful in the driver system where the bandwidth of the speed controller cannot be
made large enough.

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