SSZT 984
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Technical Article
The Seat Remembers: Brushed DC Motor Ripple Counting
Drives Innovation in Full-featured Memory Seats
Matthew Sullivan
My parents have an SUV that they share between them. When I go home, I might also use their car to visit old
friends or run errands. When all three of us are using the same car, we each have to adjust the driver’s seat
height, the distance from the steering wheel and the pedals, the steering wheel height, the angle of the chair
back, and the angle of the rearview and side mirrors.
Many high-end luxury automobiles have full-featured memory seats and mirrors, where drivers create their own
seat “profile” with their preferred angle and height adjustments. With this feature, my parents could save time by
not having to readjust the seat and mirrors.
As my colleague Clark Kinnaird discussed in his blog post, “Putting innovation in the driver’s seat,” small
brushed DC motors are controlling more and more axes of seat adjustment. Existing technology to measure
these seats uses magnetic Hall-Effect sensors attached to the body of the DC motor. Magnetic poles rotate in
the motor shaft and provide a field for sensor capture. Multiple sensors can measure the speed and total number
of motor rotations and subrotations. The number of motor rotations can be inferred and directly translated into
the total distance moved by the seat for that particular axis and saved on the memory seat control module’s
microprocessor.
SSZT984 – AUGUST 2017 The Seat Remembers: Brushed DC Motor Ripple Counting Drives Innovation 1
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Measuring Position
Positional memory and motor speed are not only popular for car seats. Many small-motor automotive
applications – including power windows, sliding doors and lift gates – can use information about the speed
of the motor to determine stall conditions for pinch detection and optimize motor speed for efficiency with pulse-
width modulation (PWM) control. Side mirrors can adjust based on different user conditions, such as changing
angles to a set position to give drivers a better view when backing the car into a parking spot. Small motors
are everywhere in automobiles, and a simple positional memory solution provides a wide array of convenient
features.
There is growing interest in determining motor position and rotational speed without the need for sensors; in
some cases redundancy in sensing helps avoid mechanical and electrical failures in memory seats. As small
motors control more axes of seat position, there is a need for more Hall-Effect sense elements mounted to
the motors, more Hall-Effect sensing integrated circuits (ICs) and more harness wiring to drive the motors and
capture sensor data.
where Varm and Rarm are the voltage applied to the motor armature and the resistive load seen on the armature.
Equation 2 expands VBEMF to be represented by the frequency of the motor as:
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Figure 2. Translating Motor Current Ripple (Yellow) into Countable Signal (Purple)
Ripple counting provides a new approach for existing technologies to provide a more comfortable and
convenient driving experience. As memory seats continue to expand beyond luxury vehicles, I can see my
family using a car with these much-appreciated memory features. Concepts like DC motor ripple counting will
help us get there.
Additional Resources
• Check out these reference designs:
• Automotive Brushed-Motor Ripple Counter Reference Design for Sensorless Position Measurement.
• Small Footprint Sunroof Motor Module Reference Design.
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