Brushless AC vs.

Brushless DC

What is the difference between a Brushless DC motor and a Brushless AC motor? Actualy, in general
these are different terms for the same motor used with different drives. Brushless DC commonly refers
to a motor driven with block commutation, also know as trapazoidal commutation or 6 step commuta-
tion, this is the most common type of drive and is said to represent 99% of the market for three phase
brushless motors. The other common system is sinusoidal commutation, which can be refered to as
either sinusoidally commutated Brushless DC or Brushless AC. This system runs off of a DC bus just
like the standard system and is identical except for having more complicated commutation logic. In
this system the power to each phase is turned on and off gradually using PWM. Power is applied to all
three phases at the same time as opposed two phases with block commutation. The fact that three
phases are powered at once makes up for the power lost due to the ramping up of power. Typically
using a sine drive results in slightly more power and slightly better efficiency from the same motor,
smoothness is also better at very low speed due to the gradual turn on and off of the motor current. In
most cases however the reason for using a sine drive to to acheive very high smoothness of motion at
very low speed, such as for machine tool axis drives, and some space and military applications. Most
sine drives use an encoder or resolver to provide the position information to create the proper commu-
tation pattern, however there are some sine drives which are sensorless. In general sine drives are not
suitable for high speeds due to the speed limitations of encoders and computational limits on the con-
trol. In general sine drives are much more expensive then conventional drives.

An advantage of sine drives is that the back emf or brushless motors is usually varies between being
approximately sinusoidal to triangular, and torque ripple is reduced by driving the motor with a voltage
profile which closely matches the motor back emf. Koford slotless motors typically have sinusoidal
back emf with less then 1% harmonic distortion so they are particularly suitable for use with sine
drives. It should be noted that in a closed loop system, as would be used for precise motion control
systems, the torque ripple is virtualy eliminated. Only the most demanding application would require
a sine drive.

phone 847-759-7221•fax 847-699-0832•www.koford.com•sk@koford.com