International Journal of Communications and Engineering Volume 03 No.

3, Issue: 01 March2012

FPGA BASED INDIRECT POSITION DETECTION AND SPEED CONTROL OF PMBLDC MOTOR USING VIRUTAL INSTRUMENTATION

ABSTRACT
Recently, the brushless dc (BLDC) motor is becoming popular in various applications because of its high efficiency, high power factor, high torque, simple control, and lower maintenance. Moreover, reducing of the drive components is more attractive for low cost applications. This paper proposes a speed response of the FPGA-based sensorless control of brushless dc(BLDC) motor drives. The sensorless position detection proposed in this paper is based on the detection of zero crossing points of the line voltage difference measured at the terminals of the motor using Virtual Instrumentation.The speed control of the motor is obtained by pulse width modulation of the pulses given to the MOSFET inverter circuit using FPGA. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through simulation and experimental results Index Terms: Brushless machines, Inverters, Zero-crossing Detection, Virtual Instrumentation, Labview, Field programmable gate array (FPGA), Sensorless control. I.INTRODUCTION Permanent magnet brushless dc (BLDC) motors have used wide application due to their power density and ease of control. Moreover, the machines have high efficiency over a wide speed range. Therefore, it is suitable for variable speed applications and results in energy saving [machines and Stepper motors. The control of BLDC motors can be done in sensor or sensorless mode, but to reduce overall cost of actuating devices, sensorless control techniques are normally used. The advantage of sensorless BLDC motor control is that the sensing part can be omitted, and thus overall costs can be considerably reduced. Sensorless control is highly advantageous when the motor is operated in dusty or oily environment, where cleaning and maintaining of Hall Sensors is required for proper sensing of rotor position. Sensorless method is preferred when the motor is in less accessible location. Accommodation of position sensor in motor used in compact unit such as computer hard disk may not be possible. Novel direct back emf detection for sensorless BLDC motor is given in [7]. The BLDC motor without position and speed sensors has attracted wide attention and many papers have reported work on this. These

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methods are based on using back-EMF of the motor, detection of the conducting state of freewheeling diode in the unexcited phase , back-EMF integration method, detection of stator third harmonic voltage components. Back-EMF estimation methods typically on the zero crossing detection of the EMF waveform. In the method proposed in this paper the line voltage difference is fed to the virtual instrument developed in Lab VIEW through serial communication and the zero crossing points are detected. Using thisdetails pulses for the inverter circuit are generated. The generated pulses are given to the FPGA (field programmable array) through serial port and the pulse width modulation is done according to the set speed. The method is simple, reliable and does not involve any integration. Further, since line voltages are used, the requirement of neutral potential has been eliminated. The Zero crossing instants are done using virtual circuits developed in Labview. This also eliminates the common mode noise. Device drops and their variations would also not play a part since line voltages are used. Section II describes the proposed back-EMF zero crossing estimation method. Section III hardware implementation of the proposed method. Section IV presents the virtual instrument and results that validate the proposal and section V presents the conclusion. II. THE PROPOSED BACK-EMF ZERO CROSSING ESTIMATION METHOD Typically, a BLDC motor is wound in a three-phase wye configuration. This configuration connects one end of each phase together to make a center point of a Y or the motor neutral point. This is then driven by a three-phase inverter with what is called six-step commutation. At any step, only two of the three

phases are conducting current where current flows into one phase and then out another. For example, when phase A and phase B conduct current, phase C is floating. A transition from one step to another step is called commutation. So, totally, there are six steps in one cycle. As shown in Fig. 1, the first step is AB (phase A and B conducting current), then to AC, to BC, to BA, to CA, to CB and then the pattern is repeated. In order to produce maximum torque, the inverter should be commutated every 60 electrical degrees so that current is in phase with the back EMF. The conducting interval for each phase is 120 electrical degrees, or two steps. The commutation timing is determined by the rotor position, which can be determined every 60 electrical degrees by detecting when the back EMF on the floating phase crosses the zero potential point, or zero crossing. Fig. 1 shows the typical inverter configuration and current commutation sequence. As mentioned above, since only two phases are conducting current at any step, one phase is available to measure back EMF. To measure the back EMF across a phase the conventional method (shown in Fig. 2) requires monitoring the phase terminal and the motor neutral point. The zero crossing of the back EMF can be obtained by comparing the terminal voltage to the neutral point. In most cases, the motor neutral point is not available. The most commonly used method is to build a virtual neutral point that will, in theory, be at the same potential as the neutral point of the wye-wound motor. This conventional detection scheme is quite simple and has been in use for some time [1]. However, this scheme has its drawbacks. When using PWM to regulate motor speed or torque/current for instance, the virtual neutral point fluctuates at the PWM frequency. As a result there is a very high common-mode voltage and high-frequency noise.

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Then the phase A terminal voltage with respect to the star point of the stator Van, is Van = Raia + La (dia/dt) +ean - (1) Similar equations for the other two phases are, Vbn = Rbib+ Lb (dib/dt) +ebn - (2) Vcn = Rcic + Lc (dic/dt) +ecn - (3) From equation (1),(2),(3) the line voltage Vab and Vbc may be determined Vab = Van - Vbn = R (ia- ib) + L (d (ia- ib ) /dt) + ean-ebn Vbc = Vbn Vcn = R (ib- ic) + L (d (ib- ic) /dt) +ebn- ecn

In the interval when phases A and C are conducting and phase B is open, phase A winding is connected to the positive of the DC supply, phase C to the negative of the DC supply and phase B is open. Therefore ia = -ic and ib = 0. Therefore in this interval the equation is simplified as, Vabbc = Vab - Vbc = -2 ebn The line voltage difference waveform is thus an inverted representation of the back-EMF waveform. The error between the line voltage difference and back EMF ,also shown in Fig. 2 is negligible at the zero crossing instant. Therefore the operation Vab-Vbc (Vabbc) enables detection of the zero crossing of the phase B EMF. Similarly the line voltage difference Vbcca enables the detection of zero crossing of phase C back-EMF. The line voltage difference Vcaab waveform gives the zero crossing of phase A back-EMF. Therefore the zero crossing instants of the back-EMF waveforms may be estimated indirectly from the line voltage differences. The line voltage difference waveform is fed in to the virtual instrument developed in LabVIEW using RS232 serial communication. In the VI the zero crossing of the back e.m.f is determined and the switching signals are generated. The switching signals are further fed to the FPGA. In Field programmable array the pulse width modulation of the particular signals are performed and fed to the MOSFET inverter circuit. The set speed is given by the user in the VI developed in LabVIEW and its fed to the FPGA using serial communication.

Fig 1: PMBLDC drive and Zero crossing points of the back-EMF and phase current commutation points.

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low ratings. To drive MOSFETs of higher ratings the outputs of MC 33035 are given to driver circuits through opto-couplers. MC 33035 is capable of controlling the speed of the motor in open loop mode only. For closed loop operation, it requires an input voltage proportional to the motor speed. This can be achieved using MC 33039.

Fig 2: Line voltage difference and back-EMF III. DESCRIPTION OF EXPERIMENTAL SETUP The block diagram of the experimental setup of the proposed sensorless BLDC motor drive is shown in fig.3. The experimental setup consists of a 24v, 8000rpm 4pole PMBLDC drive. In a three-phase brushless motor and a 120electrical-degreetype inverter, transistor commutation occurs at intervals of 60 electrical degrees. This causes important transient in the motor terminal voltages, so some techniques are necessary for the direct use of these voltages for sensing rotor position. Three phase bridge inverter fabricated using n channel MOSFET is operated in 120 degree mode to provide square wave current excitation to the stator windings. MOSFETs are used to control the speed of the motor by varying the supply voltage to the motor. It is switched with very high speed with the help of PWM waves. The PWM waves are generated by the FPGA. Inverter switches are triggered in a sequence provided by the high performance digital controller IC MC 33035. The IC contains all the functions required to implement a full featured open loop control. The output of MC 33035 is ideally suited for driving power MOSFETs of

Fig 3: Experimental setup The isolation circuit is mainly used to isolate the high voltage and low voltage circuit, SCR and Triac circuit, mechanical relay and pulse transformer. Here the 4N35 opto coupler constructs the isolation circuit. The opto coupler consists of photo LED and phototransistor. The phototransistor conducts only when light rays falls on the base of the transistor. The signal to be isolated is given to base of BC547 switching transistor. An FPGA platform used for controlling the BLDC machine is Spartan 3 family, from Xilinx. Reference speed value was set digitally, and a speed loop was used to compare the actual speed and the reference speed and based on error to determine the duty cycle for the next period. The actual speed was easily calculated as a time between line voltages. Furthermore, this scheme can be effectively implemented on an FPGA as opposed to DSPs that are used for the implementation of complex control schemes.

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This makes the present technique significantly cost effective. The FPGA operates at a clock frequency of 12 MHz. IV.VIRTUAL INSTRUMENTATION AND ITS EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS LabVIEW is a graphical programming language that uses icons instead of lines of text to create applications. LabVIEW programs are called virtual instruments, or VIs, because their appearance and operation imitate physical instruments, such as oscilloscopes and multimeters LabVIEW program facilitates virtual instrumentation (VI), which imitates the appearance and operation of physical instruments: VI is defined as a process of combining hardware and software with industry standard computer technology to create a userdefined instrumentation solution. Several other add-on toolsets can be incorporated for developing the specialised applications. Labview done the zero crossing detection and speed , current and voltage measurements.

and as shown in the table every item is below 40%. It means one can select a smaller and Low cost FPGA S350, to further reduce the cost, or one can also build up a microcontroller Intellectual Properties (IP)into FPGA to implement more sophisticated control algorithm. The Generation of pwm is implemented in Xilinx FPGA. Fig 4 shows the timing simulation of the trigger for estimated commutations

Fig 5: Experimental set-up for the proposed method The experimental results for the speed response of the FPGA-based sensorless control of brushless dc motor are discussed for the desired speed. Figure 5 shows the experimental set-up for the proposed method. Figure 6 shows the measured back emf waveform for the proposed method. Figure 7 shows the results for the speed control of brushless dc motor using Labview. The set speed and the actual speed of the motor is also displayed in front panel of labview. The actual speed value for the different set speed is given in Table1.

Fig 4: Timing simulation of the trigger for estimated commutations Table B shows how much logic resource of FPGA is used to implement the whole system,

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sensorless control, the proposed new sensorless control methods for brushless DC technique is more robust, easier to implement, and cost Effective because of virtual instrumentation and FPGA. Theoretical analysis and experimental results verified that satisfactory performance is achieved with the motors with the proposed method. Fig 6: Line voltage Difference APPENDIX A. PMBLDC Motor Specifications S.No Table 1 Speed Obtained for different Set speed in this proposed method. 1 2 3 4 5 Set Speed RPM 2500 4500 5000 6200 7500 Number of poles Fig 7: Results for the proposed method V. CONCLUSION This paper has presented a novel FPGA-based sensorless control scheme for six-switch threephase brushless dc motor drives. In the scheme, the speed response of the FPGA-based sensorless control of brushless dc(BLDC) motor drives is proposed. The position information is estimated from the crossings of voltage waveforms in floating phases, and a low cost FPGA is utilized to implement the algorithm. Because the stator current waveforms of the inverter using this novel voltage PWM scheme are rectangular, the motor will operate smoothly and the torque ripple will be reduced. Compared with the conventional back EMF zero crossing Line to line resistance Lineto line inductance Nominal voltage Rated current Rated Speed Actual Speed RPM 2560 4560 5120 6260 7520 4 Poles 0.2 ohms 0.45 mH 24 V 3A 8000RPM

B.Device utilizations summary of Fpga:

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REFERENCES [1] B.K. Bose, Power Electronics and AC Drives, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: 1986. [2] L. Hao, H. A. Toliyat, BLDC motor full-speed operation using hybrid sliding mode observer, in Proc. IEEE-APEC Annu. Meeting, Miami, FL, Feb. 9-13, 2003, vol. 1, pp. 286- 293. [3] P.Pillay and R. Krishnan, Application characteristics of permanent magnet synchronous and brushless dc motors for servo drives, IEEE Trans.on Ind. Appl., vol. 27, no. 5, pp. 986--996, Sep./Oct. 1991 [4] T.J.E. Miller, Brushless PermanentMagnet and Reluctance Motor Drives, Oxford, 1989. [5] R Krishnan, Electric motor drivesmodeling, analysis and control , Prentice Hall of India Private Limited, 2002. [6] K.Uzuka, H.Uzuhashi, et al., Microcomputer Control for Sensorless Brushless Motor , IEEE Trans. on Industry Application ,Vol.IA-21, MayJune, 1985 [7] J.Shao, D.Nolan, and T.Hopkins, A Novel Direct Back EMF Detection for Sensorless Brushless DC(BLDC) Motor Drives, Applied Power Electronic Conference (APEC 2002), pp33-38. [8] N.Mastui, Sensorless PM Brushless DC Motor Drives, IEEE Trans. on Industrial Electronics, Vol. 43, April 1996. [9] R Krishnan, Electric motor drivesmodeling, analysis and control ,

Prentice Hall of India Private Limited, 2002. [10] Yoko Amano, Toshio Tsuji, Atsushi Takahashi, Shigaoonchi, A Sensorless Drive system for BLDC using a Digital phase-Locked Loop, Wiley periodicals Inc. vol.142 No.1pp1155-1162, 2003. [11] Changliang Xia, Zhiqiang Li, and Tingna Shi A Control Strategy for Four-Switch Three-Phase Brushless DC Motor Using Single Current SensorIEEETrans.on Ind. Elect., vol. 56, NO. 6, JUNE 2009. [12] S. Ogasawara and H. Akagi, An approach to position sensorless drive for brushless dc motors, IEEE Trans. Ind. Appl., vol. 27, no. 5, pp.928 933, Sep. 1991. [13] N. Matsui Sensorless PM brushless DC motor drives, IEEE Trans. Ind.Electron., vol. 43, no. 2, pp. 300308, Apr. 1996.

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