2010 Second International conference on Computing, Communication and Networking Technologies

Fuzzy Based Reconfigurable Controller for BLDC Motor

A. Albert Rajan*1, R. Daniel Raj*2 Dr. S. Vasantharathna*3
Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering Karunya University, Coimbatore*1,2, Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Coimbatore Institute of Technology, Coimbatore*3 *1 [email protected], *2 [email protected], *[email protected]

Abstract - The development of advanced motor drive increases rapidly, because of its higher performance characteristics and reliability. The conventional motor drive technology is replaced with Brushless DC motor (BLDC) drive due to its higher efficiency, lower maintenance, high reliability and high torque to weight ratio. This paper focuses on reconfigurable controller using fuzzy logic technique for a BLDC motor for variable frequency and variable duty ratio operation. In digital controller of brushless DC motor, the control accuracy is of a high level, and it has a low response time; furthermore, this technique is implemented using reconfigurable Vertex II Pro development board. This proposed energy efficient controller consumes 70 mW, which is less compared to other conventional controllers. Keywords Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA), Fuzzy Controller, Brushless DC motor (BLDC), Pulse Width modulation (PWM), Energy efficient controller.

and quick hardware verification. FPGA based systems are flexible and can be reprogrammed unlimited number of times

978-1-4244-6589-7/10/$26.00 2010 IEEE

The conventional PWM technique for BLDC motor drives fed by MOSFET inverter reduces the conduction loss by 120 phase commutation. In a conventional three-phase BLDC machine with two-phase 120 electrical conduction, referred as the 120 PWM method. The by-products of PWM technique include switching losses and conduction loss at power device side and harmonics at load side. [3]. Permanent magnet brushless dc (BLDC) motor drives are widely used in high performance applications where torque smoothness is essential. Commutation torque ripple occurs at every 60 electrical degrees changing over of load current from one phase to another. The torque ripple increases at higher speeds due to increase in commutation time [4]. In many control methods, torque ripple reduction is considered with current control, which means that if current can be controlled properly, the BLDC Motor does not produce any torque ripple [5]. The digital implementation of industrial control system such as field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) can also be considered as an appropriate solution in order to boost the performance of the controllers. BLDC motor is well suited for digital control methods, thus FPGA is ideal for controlling this motor [6]. This paper is organized as follows. First, BLDC motor drive strategies are discussed in comparison with the conventional drive strategies. Due to the nonlinear characteristics of the BLDC motor, the Fuzzy logic technique is discussed since it is ideal methodology for deciding the frequency and duty ratio. Then the digital PWM controller for Brushless DC motor (BLDC) are introduced and then the features of the presented technique are fully explored. Finally experimental results for various constraints are presented to support the theoretical claims. II. BRUSHLESS DC MOTOR DRIVE STRATEGIES For a three-phase BLDC application, the most common topology used is a three-phase buck-derived converter or a

I. INTRODUCTION Recently, Brushless DC Motor (BLDC) has been widely used due to preciseness of industrial technology and increase of various kind of digital control device. Because of its high efficiency and excellent control character BLDC motor is more suitable in many industrial applications. In conventional constant frequency digital PWM controller method, speed and current of the motor are taken as reference. The controller compares the speed and current value with that of the present data. The actual current has compared with the current limit value, if it is greater, speed will be compared. The greater the actual speed selects high duty ratio else low duty ratio will be selected. The change in duty ratio results in low speed ripples [1]. Fuzzy logic has been applied to large number of control applications such as system control, domestic appliances, traffic control, etc., because the control action in fuzzy logic controllers (FLC) can be easily expressed by means of linguistic variables describing simply human friendly if-then rules. In conventional methods the hardware implementation of FLC are based on microcontrollers, as control systems requires high processing and I/O handling speeds microcontrollers have often difficulty with these control applications. The use of FPGA results in fast implementation

three-phase inverter bridge [7]. The typical inverter drive system for a BLDC motor is shown in Fig. 1. The output stage consists of a three-phase inverter composed of switches that could be MOSFETs or insulated-gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs). If IGBTs are used, anti-parallel diodes need to be connected across them for carrying reverse currents, while MOSFETs use body diodes. MOSFETs give lower turn-off switching loss and usually lower diode forward drop, but that advantage may be offset by higher ON-state voltage drop and turn-on switching diode reverse recovery loss than IGBTs.

To rotate the BLDC motor, the stator windings should be energized in a sequence. It is important to know the rotor position in order to follow position is sensed using Hall effect sensors embedded into the stator. By reading the Hall Effect sensors, a 3-b code can be obtained, with values ranging from one to six. Each code value therefore gives us information on which windings needed to be excited to turn the rotor [9], [10]. State 0 and 7 are considered invalid states for Hall Effect sensors. The input sensor state and the corresponding drive state required for commutation is shown in Table 1. III. FUZZY LOGIC CONTROLLER FOR A BLDC MOTOR Fuzzy logic control theory is an alternative to the classical control theory. In fuzzy logic, a fuzzy set is a generalization of the classical set with membership value in the range 0 to 1. Fuzzification is the first component in the FLC is responsible for taking real input data and converting into a set of membership values in the interval zero to one in the corresponding fuzzy sets. The types of membership function shapes are triangular, trapezoidal or exponential.
Low1 1 Low2 Med1 Med2 High1

Idc + S1 Udc S2 Fig.1 Typical inverter drive system for a BLDC motor

S3

S5

S4

S6

The back EMF induced per phase of the motor winding is constant for 120. In order to get constant output power and constant output torque, current is driven through a motor winding during the flat portion of the back-EMF waveform. Only two switches are turned on at a time, one in high side and the other in low side. Thus, for a stator-connected motor winding, two phases are connected in series across the DC bus, while the third winding is open. The switches in Fig. 1 are operated such that each phase carries current only during the 120 period when the back EMF is constant. The commutation sequence requires knowledge of rotor position, which can be directly detected using hall sensors [8].
TABLE I

16

32

64

Speed

Fig. 2 Membership Function for speed

Clockwise sensor and drive bits by phase order

The membership function for speed is shown in the Fig. 2. It consists of fuzzy logic ranges that can be defined using the linguistic terms as low1, low2, med1, med2 and high1. The ranges are used for demonstrating the fuzzification process in VHDL. Similarly the membership function for current is shown in the Fig. 3. The fuzzy logic ranges defined using the linguistic terms as low, med and high. These two inputs are further processed using the inference engine. The ranges are taken in the powers of two since the programming language can accept only values that are in powers of two.

Sensor O/P Phase 1 2 3 4 5 6 C 1 1 1 0 0 0 B 0 0 1 1 1 0 A 1 0 0 0 1 1 CH 0 0 0 1 1 0 CL 1 1 0 0 0 0

Drive Bits BH 1 0 0 0 0 1 BL 0 0 1 1 0 0 AH 0 1 1 0 0 0 AL 0 0 0 0 0 Fig. 3 Membership Function for current 1 1 16 32 64 Current Low 1 Med High

Inference engine consists of two sub-blocks, fuzzy rule base and fuzzy implication. The inputs, which are now fuzzified, are fed to the inference engine and the rule base is then applied. The output fuzzy sets are then identified using

fuzzy implication method. Table II shows the fuzzy associative memory for speed and current. The fuzzy rule base we followed is if-then rule, If (speed is low1 and current is low) or (speed is low1 and current is med). The speed is low. The input to the fuzzy logic controller is speed and current which are fed from analog to digital converter (8-bit). The fuzzy rule base is followed and the output constraint is obtained from fuzzy associative memory. The defuzzified output from the fuzzy is 4-bit single-ton data.

of the step-down chopper with resistive load is shown in Fig. 5. The average output voltage is given by (1)

Vo
TABLE II

Vdc

Fuzzy Associative Memory Speed/Current Low1 Low2 Med1 Med2 High1 High Low1 Low4 Med2 Med5 Large3 Medium Low2 Low5 Med3 Large1 Vlarge1 Low low3 Med1 Med4 Large2 Vlarge2 Fig. 5 Output voltage of the step-down chopper T1 Ts T2

IV. DIGITAL PWM CONTROLLER A) Background Speed control in a BLDC involves changing the applied voltage across the motor phases. This can be done using a sensor method based on the concept of PWM [11]. Pulse width Modulation (PWM) serves to control the average output voltage given a fixed input voltage.

Where T1 is the ON-time, Ts is the chopping period, D is the duty ratio and f is the chopping frequency. A parameter called the duty ratio (D) is defined as the ratio of the on-time duration to the switching time period, as given by (2) (3) The duty cycle D can be varied from 0 to 1 by varying T1, Ts or f. Therefore, the output voltage Vo can be varied by controlling duty cycle D and the power flow can be controlled [12]. B) Proposed PWM controller

Rectifier

Inverter

BLDC

Commutation Logic
Speed Command Current Ref

Hall Sensor o/p

(Variable voltage) + -

PI

Dc chopper

Inverter
Current

BLDC

Curre nt Feedback

ADC

Spee d Fee dback

Fig. 4 Conventional PWM current control

PWM Signal for variable voltage

FPGA
Speed

ADC

The conventional PWM current control method is shown in Fig. 4. The PI controller takes speed and current as reference, when the actual current is greater than current limit, then speed will be compared with the reference speed if it higher high duty ratio is selected, else it will select low duty ratio. The switching nature of the step-down chopper results in a variable average voltage at the output. It is important to derive a relation between the input voltage and output voltage as a function of the on-time and off-time. The output voltage

Hall Sensor Output

Fig. 6 Proposed PWM controller

The proposed PWM controller is shown in Fig. 6. The DC Chopper is used for variable voltage. The FPGA takes three inputs speed, current fed from ADC and hall sensor output. The output of the FPGA gives six switching pulses. The PWM controller proposed here is based on variable voltagefrequency method. The speed variation is achieved by

variable voltage provided by the chopper. The PWM pulse frequency and duty ratio will be dynamically varied without affecting the voltage to the motor. Any change in the input voltage fed from chopper will be controlled by the switching pulses supplied by the FPGA.

Total Number of 4 input LUTs Total equivalent gate count for design Additional JTAG gate count for IOBs 2,016 59,597 1,411 27,392 5%

Estimated Power of the controller 70mW (using Xilinx Xpower )

V. FPGA IMPLEMENTATION Virtex-II Pro FPGA (XC2VP30-FF896) is used for the realization of the proposed technique. The code is developed using VHDL language and implemented in Xilinx 9.1i. Fig. 7 shows the block diagram of software implementation of fuzzy based reconfigurable controller. The block diagram contains three modules. The inputs speed and current of the motor is given to the Fuzzy controller, which generates a 4 bit defuzzified output and given to thePWM generation unit which determines the frequency and duty ratio proportional for the FLC output. The Commutation logic decides the coil to be excited based on the Hall sensor input to the controller.
From Hall Sensors Commutation Logic To Inverter

To DC Chopper

PWM

Current 8-bit Speed 8-bit

Fuzzy Controller

Fig. 7 FPGA implementation of Reconfigurable controller

Fig. 8 RTL Schematic of top module

The proposed controller is supplied with two inputs speed and current through ADC. The input ranges are normalized to the range of 0 to 100 and represented in powers of 2 and processed by the fuzzy controller. The membership value ranges in the 0 to 1 is normalized to 0 to 100. The output of the fuzzy controller is designed for four bit singleton output. Further the 4 bit value has the maximum value of 16. This 4 bit value selects the switching frequency of inverter and the corresponding duty ratio. The minimum frequency generated is 4 KHz and the corresponding duty ratio is 6.25%. The maximum frequency generated is 20 KHz and the duty ratio is 93.75%. In between this minimum and maximum region the frequency and also the duty ratio will be varied.
TABLE III

Design Utilization Summary of Reconfigurable Controller

Logic Utilization

Used

Available

Utilization Fig. 9 RTL Schematic of Reconfigurable Controller

The total power consumption estimated using Xilinx Xpower is 70 mW. This reconfigurable controller utilizes an approximate of 62,000 gate count. The detailed design utilization of reconfigurable controller is shown in Table III. The RTL schematic of reconfigurable controller is shown in Fig. 8 and 9.

VI. SIMULATION AND EXPERIMENTALRESULTS The simulation results for the reconfigurable fuzzy controller are shown in the Fig. 10 and 11. The input to the fuzzy controller is fed from motor through ADC; when the input values of speed (00111101) and the current (00011110).

When the hall sensor output a=1, b=0, c=1. The corresponding switch closed will be bhigh and Clow. Similarly when the input values of speed = 00110001and current = 00001111 and hall sensor output a=0, b=1 and c=1. The corresponding switch closed will be ahigh and blow.

Fig. 10 Simulation Results for Reconfigurable Controller when speed = 00111101and current = 00011110

Fig. 11 Simulation Results for Reconfigurable Controller when speed = 00110001and current = 00001111

The experimental results are carried and finally results are tested with digital storage oscilloscope. The experimental results are shown in Fig 12 and 13. The corresponding duty cycle ratio and the switching frequency generated for the input speed (00111101), current (00011110) and speed = 00110001and current = 00001111 are shown in waveform. Figure 11 and 12 reflects the variable frequency, variable duty ratio operation of the Fuzzy logic controller designed for specific steady speed operation. Here the frequency and the duty ratio is self compensated for steady speed operation.

VII. CONCLUSION A new reconfigurable digital controller for BLDC motor has been designed and the performance was tested from the simulated results and the experimental results. This controller is the cost effective reconfigurable controller. Better performance of the controller may be achieved by tuning the fuzzy system. The performance of the motor can be improved by the controller just by changing the code which is embedded in FPGA for the optimal performance. The power consumed by the controller is just 70 mW. Compared to the conventional discrete electronic controller this power is much low. REFERENCES
[1]. Anand Sathyan, Nikola Milivojevic, Young-Joo Lee, Mahesh Krishnamurthy and Ali Emadi, An FPGA-Based Novel Digital PWM Control Scheme for BLDC Motor Drives, IEEE Tran. Ind. Elect, Vol. 56, No.8, August 2009, Page no. 3040-3049. [2]. Sameep Singh, Kuldip S. Rattan, Implementation of a Fuzzy logic controller on an FPGA for a DC Motor,IEEE 2003, pp.387-394 [3]. Yen-Shin Lai, Fu-san Shyu, Yung-Hsin Chang, Novel Loss Reduction Pulse width Modulation Technique for Brushless DC Motor Drives Fed by MOSFET Inverter , IEEE trans. Power Electron, vol.19, No.6, Nov.2004, pp. 1646-1652 [4].S.S.Bharatkar, Raju Yanamshetti, D. Chatterjee, A.K. Ganguli,Reduction of Commutation Torque Ripple in a Brushless DC nd Motor Drive, in 2 IEEE Int. conf. Power & energy, Dec 1-3,2008, Malaysia. [5]. L.Yong, Z.Q.Zhu, and D.Howe, Commutation Torque Ripple Analysis and Reduction through Hybrid Switching for BLDC Motor Drive, IEEE Trans. Ind Elect, vol.43, no.4, pp. 1012 1021, 2002 [6]. E. Monmasson and M. N. Cirstea, FPGA design methodology for industrial control systemsA review, IEEE Trans. Ind. Elect, vol. 54, No. 4, pp. 18241842, Aug. 2007. [7]. Dejan Kos, Milan Curkovi c and Karel Jezernik, FPGA Based BLDC Motor Current Control with Spectral Analysis, IEEE 2006, pp.1217 1222 [8]. Z. Chen, M. Tomita, S. Doki, and S. Okuma, New adaptive sliding observers for position and velocity sensor less controls of brushless DC motors, IEEE Trans. Ind. Elect, vol. 47, no. 3, pp. 582591, Jun. 2000. [9]. F. Rodriguez, P. Desai, and A. Emadi, A novel digital control technique for trapezoidal brushless DC motor drives, in Proc. Power Electron.Technol. Conf., Chicago, IL, Nov. 2004. [10]. F. Rodriguez and A. Emadi, A novel digital control technique for brushless DC motor drives: Conduction-angle control, in Proc. IEEE Int. Elect. Mach. Drives Conf., May 2005, pp. 308314. [11]. W. Brown, Brushless DC control made easy, Application Notes Microchip. AN857. [12]. Muhammad H. Rashid, Power Electronics Circuits, Devices and Applications, Prentice Hall of India, second edition.

Fig. 12 Experimental results when speed = 0011110, Current = 00011110

Fig. 13 Experimental results when speed = 00110001, current = 0001111