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Published in IET Electric Power Applications Received on 23rd May 2007 Revised on 30th August 2007 doi: 10.1049/iet-epa:20070242

ISSN 1751-8660

Design and practical implementation of a back-EMF sliding-mode observer for a brushless DC motor
H. Fakham1 M. Djemai2 K. Busawon3
Robotic Laboratory of Versaille, 10-12, Avenue de lEurope, Velizy 78000, France Control System Laboratory, ENSEA, 6 Avenue du Ponceau, Cergy-Pontoise 95014, France 3 Northumbria University, School of Computing, Engineering and Information Sciences, Ellison Building, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 8ST, UK E-mail: krishna.busawon@unn.ac.uk
2 1

Abstract: A sliding-mode observer is proposed in order to estimate the phase-to-phase trapezoidal back-EMF in a brushless DC motor by using only the measurements of the stator currents and voltages. The main feature of the proposed observer is that it is not sensitive to the switching noise and no ltering is required. The back-EMF estimate was then used to deduce the six rotor positions of the motor. In addition, a method to obtain an estimate of the rotor speed of the motor, by exploiting the mathematical relationship between the speed and the back-EMF, is presented. The observer of the trapezoidal back-EMF is implemented practically on a DSP board. Simulation and experimental results are given to show the performance of the observer.

Introduction

In recent years, there has been a steady rise in the demand for brushless DC (BLDC) motors for industrial and domestic applications. Their growing popularity is mainly due to their high efciency and reliability and other attractive features such as long lifetime, reduced noise and overall reduction of electromagnetic interference. In general, the fact that they are more efcient than brushed DC motors outweigh their main disadvantage of being costly. A BLDC motor is a type of synchronous motors, having permanent magnets on the rotor and trapezoidal shape back-EMF. The traditional way to control a BLDC motor is via voltage-source current-controlled inverters as shown in Fig. 1. The inverter must supply a rectangular current waveform whose magnitude is proportional to the motors shaft torque. Three Hall-effect sensors are usually employed as position sensors to perform current commutations. The knowledge of the six rotor positions is required since the main objective is to obtain quasi-square current waveforms, with dead time periods of 608. The IET Electr. Power Appl., 2008, Vol. 2, No. 6, pp. 353 361 doi: 10.1049/iet-epa:20070242

main drawback of this control strategy is that the sensors increase the cost and render the overall system quite cumbersome. This, in turn, reduces the reliability of the total system. As a result, a great deal of attention has been given to sensorless control of BLDC motor in recent years, that is, control of the BLDC motor without using the position sensors. In that context, a number of methods to obtain or estimate the rotor positions and speed of BLDC motors have been proposed in the literature (see references herein). In most of the existing methods, the rotor position is detected every 608, which is necessary to ensure current commutations. These methods are based on a variety of strategies, including back-EMF voltage sensing in the undriven coils [1, 2], detection of the freewheeling diodes conduction [3], back-EMF integration [4], ux estimation [5] and the motor modication technique [6] to infer the rotor position. However, the mentioned strategies work well only over a limited range of speed. A strategy for sensorless control of BLDC motors that is suitable for a wide range of rated-speed and low-cost applications is the so-called observer-based control method. As a matter of 353

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variations and noise. The sliding-mode observer was implemented practically on a DSP board (eZdsp F2812) using a laboratory set-up. The experimental results obtained consolidates the good performance of the observer with respect to noise rejection. The outline of the paper is as follows. In the next section, the model of BLDC motor is developed on the basis of which a sliding-mode observer of the phase-to-phase trapezoidal back-EMF is constructed. In Section 3, a ZCD of the back-EMF to obtain the six rotor positions is presented. In Section 4, a direct approach is developed to obtain the speed from the estimated phase-to-phase back-EMF. Sections 5 and 6 are devoted to simulation and experimental results. Finally, some conclusions are drawn on the overall design and the results obtained.

Figure 1 Sensorless control strategy using sliding-mode observer fact, this was the main motivation in [7] for employing the extended kalman lter (EKF) to estimate the instantaneous rotor position and speed of the BLDC motor. Unfortunately, for that particular case, it was shown that the speed estimation accuracy was reduced, especially at low speeds. In addition, the EKF has some inherent shortcomings in that it is computationally tedious to implement and is sensitive to the inuence of noise. There is therefore a real incentive to nd alternative observer design methods that are easy to implement and that are robust with respect to noise, for estimating the rotor position of the BLDC motor. In this respect, slidingmode observers constitute an attractive alternative since they are robust with respect to measurement noise and parametric uncertainties of the system. In this paper, taking into account the above observations, we propose a sliding-mode observer to estimate the trapezoidal back-EMF in the undriven coils of a BLDC motor. The estimated back-EMF is in turn used to deduce the rotor position and speed of the motor. To be more precise, the estimated trapezoidal back-EMF obtained is, in fact, the phase-to-phase back-EMF that is induced between two phases. It does not depend on the stator voltage harmonics (that are multiple of order three) or on the commutation noise introduced by the inverter (neutral point cannot be connected). The estimated phase-to-phase trapezoidal back-EMF is employed to infer the six instantaneous rotor position via simple zero crossing detectors (ZCDs). In addition, a method to obtain a direct estimation of the speed, by exploiting the mathematical relationship between the latter and the back-EMF, is given. As far as the authors are aware, sliding-mode observers have not been employed in the context of sensorless control of BLDC motors in the literature. Simulation results has shown the good performance of the proposed sliding-mode observer with respect to parameter 354 & The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2008

BLDC motor model

In BLDC motors, there are only two of the three phases conducting at any point of time, as the stator winding neutral point of the machine is oating and is not accessible in general. This often makes it impossible to directly measure phase voltages. The BLDC motor is modelled in the stationary reference frame abc using: 1. the subtractions of currents (Ia 2 Ib , Ib 2 Ic , Ic 2 Ia), which are measured between two phases, 2. the phase-to-phase back-EMF (Eab , Ebc , Eca) 3. and the phase-to-phase voltages (Uab , Ubc , Uca). As a result, the following model has been derived [8, 9] 8 > d I I R I I 1 E 1 U > b b > dt a > L a L ab L ab > < 1 d R 1 Ib Ic Ib Ic Ebc Ubc > L L L > dt > > d 1 > R 1 : Ic Ia Ic Ia Eca Uca dt L L L

(1)

To reduce the order of model (1), only the electric quantities of the two phases (a b) and (b c) are taken, respectively. The following traditional assumptions are made.

The distribution of the phase-to-phase back-EMF is trapezoidal, and its variation is very slow. The motor is unsaturated. The armature reaction is negligible. The phases are balanced. IET Electr. Power Appl., 2008, Vol. 2, No. 6, pp. 353 361 doi: 10.1049/iet-epa:20070242

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The following model is then obtained: 1 d R 1 I Ib Ia Ib Eab Uab dt a L L L 1 d R 1 I Ic Ib Ic Ebc Ubc dt b L L L d E 0 dt ab d E 0 dt bc System (2) can be written in the state space as follows x a 1 x 1 a 2 x 3 a 2 V 1 _
1 2 3 4

surface S is given by ^ x1 x1 S x2 x2 ^   sign(s1 ) Is sign(s2 ) s1 s2       0 0

(2)

More precisely, the observer has the following form


:

^ ^ x1 a1 x1 a2 x3 a2 V1 k11 sign(x1 x1 ) ^ ^ k12 sign(x2 x2 )


:

: :

^ ^ x2 a1 x2 a2 x4 a2 V2 k21 sign(x1 x1 ) ^ k22 sign(x2 x2 ) ^

(6)

x a 1 x 2 a 2 x 4 a 2 V 2 _ x0 _ x0 _ y1 x1 y2 x2 where x1 Ia 2 Ib , x2 Ib 2 Ic , x3 Eab , and x4 Ebc are the state variables, V1 Uab , and V2 Ubc are the input variables, y1 and y2 represent the output variables and a1 (R/L) and a2 (1/L) are the systems parameters. Under the assumption that the system is balanced, the third back-EMF, Eca , between the two phases (c a) can be easily deduced by using the formula Eab Ebc Eca 0 (4) (3)

^ ^ x3 k31 sign(x1 x1 ) k32 sign(x2 x2 ) ^ ^ ^ x4 k41 sign(x1 x1 ) k42 sign(x2 x2 ) ^ The above observer requires the selection of eight gains which has to be chosen appropriately to ensure the convergence of the estimated state to the real state. However, this task can be tedious, even though not impossible. For the sake of simplicity, we shall employ a simpler version of the above observer with a reduced number of gains. More specically, we set k12 k21 k32 k41 0 and employ the following observer throughout the rest of the paper
:

^ ^ x1 a1 x1 a2 x3 a2 V1 k11 sign(x1 x1 ) ^
: : :

^ ^ x2 a1 x2 a2 x4 a2 V2 k22 sign(x2 x2 ) ^ ^ x3 k31 sign(x1 x1 ) ^ ^ x4 k42 sign(x2 x2 ) ^

(7)

In the following section, the above model (3) is used to design a sliding-mode observer in order to estimate the phase-to-phase back-EMF Eab and Ebc .

We shall show that in order to ensure the convergence of the observer, the gains should satisfy the following conditions (C1) (C2)     k11 . a2 e3 max and k22 . a2 e4 max (k31 =k11 ) , 0 and (k42 =k22 ) , 0

Sliding-mode observer design

First of all, note that system (3) is, in fact, a linear system with parametric uncertainty. By using the measurements of the stator currents and the input phase-to-phase voltage, the observer therefore takes the following form
:

More precisely, we state the following proposition.

Proposition 1: Assume that system (3) is uncoupled (i.e. x1


does not depend on x2), then system (7) is an asymptotic observer for system (3) provided that its gains satisfy conditions (C1) and (C2).

^ x1 a1 x1 a2 x a2 V1 K1 I s ^
3 :

x2 a1 x2 a2 x a2 V2 K2 I s ^ ^
4 :

(5)

x3 K3 Is ^
:

Proof: By setting e x x, it can be shown that the error ^ dynamics is given by


e1 _ e2 _ e3 _ e4 _ a2 e3 k11 sign(e1 ) a2 e4 k22 sign(e2 ) k31 sign(e1 ) k42 sign(e2 )

x4 K4 Is ^ where K1 (k11 , k12 ), K2 (k21 ,k22 ), K3 (k31 , k32 ), K4 (k41 , k42 ) are the gains of the observer, and the sliding IET Electr. Power Appl., 2008, Vol. 2, No. 6, pp. 353 361 doi: 10.1049/iet-epa:20070242

(8)

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Consider the following candidate Lyapunov function 1 2 1 2 V (e) e1 e2 2 2 The time derivative of V(e) along the trajectories of e is given by _ V (e) e1 e1 e2 e2 _ _ e1 a2 e3 k11 sign(e1 ) e2 a2 e4 k22 sign(e2 ) We need to nd conditions on the observer gains, in order _ to force V (e) to be negative. These conditions are if e1 . 0, the switching gain k11 . 2 a2e3; if e1 , 0, the switching gain k11 . a2e3; if e2 . 0, the switching gain k22 . 2 a2e4; if e2 , 0, the switching gain k22 . a2e4 . As the vector e(t) is bounded for all time t, the above conditions can be reduced to condition (C2) given above;    that is, k11 . a2 e3 max and k22 . a2 e4 max . Consequently, the vector e1,2 (t) (e1 (t), e2 (t)) is globally asymptotically _ _ stable. We therefore have V (e) , 0 for e = 0 and V (e) 0 when e 0. When sliding-mode regime occurs, that is, when systems behaviour is on the sliding surface S, we have _ _ (e1 (t), e2 (t)) ( e1 (t), e2 (t)) 0. In such a case, we have 0 a2 e3 k11 sign(e1 ) 0 a2 e4 k22 sign(e2 ) or  Is  sign(e1 ) sign(e2 )  0a e 1 2 3 B k11 C @a e A 2 4 k22

Rotor position detection

The sensorless control scheme, in which the above slidingmode observer is employed, is illustrated in Fig. 1. Generally, the BLDC motor is controlled through voltagesource current-controlled inverters whereby the drive employs an inner current loop with an outer speed loop. The inverter must supply a rectangular current waveform whose magnitude, IMAX , is proportional to the machine shaft torque. The equivalent DC current is obtained through the sensing of two of the three armature currents. From these currents, the absolute value is taken, and a DC component which corresponds to the amplitude, IMAX , of the original phase currents is obtained. This DC component is compared with a reference coming from the output of the speed regulator 1 [PI(1)], and the error signal is processed through a PI controller 2 [PI(2)]. The output of the PI controller 2 is compared with a saw-tooth carrier signal, to generate the PWM for the power transistors. At the same time, the estimated position determines which couple among the six transistors of the inverter should receive this PWM signal. In this scheme, the outputs of the sliding-mode observer provide an estimate of the phase-to-phase back-EMF. The estimate is then fed to the ZCDs to estimate the commutation points. As shown in Fig. 2, the detection of the six rotor positions (ur) of the motor can be easily determined from the estimated phase-to-phase back-EMFs. For instance, during the switch commutation a of the transistor Ta, one can deduce that the phase-to-phase back-EMF Eab is always positive and that the phase-to-phase back-EMF Eca is always negative.

(9)

The vector I s DI s represents the equivalent output error  injection term necessary to maintain a sliding-mode on S. Using the equivalent output (9), the reduced-order sliding-mode is governed by e3 k31 =a2 e3 k11 _ e4 k42 =a2 e4 k22 _ (10)

Under constraints (C2), the tracking error e(t) converges to zero exponentially. This completes the proof of Proposition 1. A

Remark 1: Note that the estimation error can be made to converge to zero arbitrarily fast by appropriate choice of the observer gains satisfying conditions C1 and C2.
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Figure 2 Phases currents (Ia , Ib , Ic) and phase-to-phase back-EMFs (Eab , Ebc , Eca) IET Electr. Power Appl., 2008, Vol. 2, No. 6, pp. 353 361 doi: 10.1049/iet-epa:20070242

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This means that it is possible to obtain a sufcient condition in order to extract the state switch commutation a of the transistor Ta; that is, it is enough to have Eab . 0 and Eca , 0. For the other switch commutations, the same analysis logic is employed. parameters are given in Section 7. The robustness of the proposed observer with respect to noise and parameter variations was tested. We have carried out a series of simulations whereby we have xed the speed at 1000 rpm. The rst set of simulations analyses the performance of the observer under the effect of a measurement noise in the current. A 10% uniform random noise was added to the current. As it can be seen in Fig. 4, the observer is robust with respect to measurement noise. Even though not shown here, a similar performance was observed for the estimation of Ebc . The second set of simulation is carried out when a small error of 20% in the value of stator inductances is made. Fig. 5 shows that this has little inuence on the convergence of the observer. However, one can observe the appearance of oscillations and peaks during the transient period and which diminish during steady state. The rotor speed and position estimation is done via the zero detectors as mentioned previously. The prole of the ^ motor speed vr and its estimate vr is shown in Fig. 6.

Rotor speed estimation

In order to obtain the instantaneous rotor speed of the motor, we employ the method given in [10]. The method uses the mathematical relation between the magnitude Emax(phase-to-phase) and rotor speed dened by

vr
with

Emax(phase-to-phase) 2KEMF

(11)

Emax(phase-to-neutral) KEMF vr where KEMF is the back-EMF constant. In other words Emax(phase-to-neutral) Emax(phase-to-phase) 2

The magnitude Emax(phase-to-phase) can be determined using the estimated phase-to-phase back-EMF and six commutations points. Using the phase-to-phase back-EMF estimate provided by sliding-mode observer and the six commutations points determined through the ZCD block, the Emax amplitude is obtained as depicted in Fig. 3.

Simulation results

Figure 4 Estimation of Eab under noisy measurement

In order to study the performance of the proposed slidingmode observer for both the position and speed estimations in relation to the sensorless BLDC motor drive, a detailed digital computer program using simulation package MATLAB/Simulink was developed. The motor

Figure 5 Estimation of Eab under a variation in Lcs

Figure 3 Determination of Emax of the phase-to-phase backEMFs IET Electr. Power Appl., 2008, Vol. 2, No. 6, pp. 353 361 doi: 10.1049/iet-epa:20070242

Figure 6 Measured speed vr and observed speed vr 357

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Figure 7 Rotor position ur and its estimate ur Here again the good tracking performance of the observer can ^ be observed. Finally, the rotor position ur and its estimate ur are shown in Fig. 7.

Experimental results
Figure 9 Measured actual trapezoidal phase-to-phase back-EMF of BLDCM code generation tools with a set of debugging and real-time analysis capabilities. After having generated the control algorithm code of the BLDC motor, one can observe that the shape of the motor phase current resembles the ideal 1208 step waveform. A comparison of the results obtained in sumulation and experimentally is shown in Figs. 10 and 11. One can observe that the prole of both currents is similar. Also, as is illustrated in Fig. 12, the motor phase current is pulsating, which is provided in real time by the computer through the CCS. It is well known that the technique of the slipping modes generates undesirable chattering; this problem can be circumvented by replacing the switching sign function by a continuous function which is smoothed in the vicinity of the slipping surface [11]. In our case, we chose the following function 8 1 > > > > 1 n2 > > > > m m (si m2 ) n2 > 3 > > > n n2 > 2 1 > > > m m (si m1 ) n1 > 2 > > > n n1 > 1 0 > > > > m1 m0 (si m0 ) n0 > > < si sign(si ) m0 > > > n n > 1 0 > > > m m (si m0 ) n0 > 1 > > > n n0 > 2 1 > > > m m (si m1 ) n1 > 2 > 1 > > > 1n > 2 > > > m m (si m2 ) n2 > 3 > 2 > : 1 if if if if if if if if if m 1 m 2 m 3 si . m3

The proposed estimation method was implemented experimentally by using a laboratory set-up, which is shown in Fig. 8. It comprises a BLDC motor with trapezoidal back-EMF as illustrated in Fig. 9. The motor rating is: 220 V, Imax 30A, 1800 rpm, Cn 12 N m. The motor parameters were Rs 0.966 V, Lcs 11.592 mH, p 2 and Ke 0.665 V/rad/s. The principal elements of the test drive block are: the voltage-source inverter with insulated gate bipolar transistor, LEMs (sensors currents and terminal voltages) and the IC30S circuit switch which isolate the IGBT from the control circuit. The control and estimation algorithm has been implemented on a eZdspF2812 evaluation board as depicted in Fig. 8. In the control algorithm, we employ an inner current loop without the outer speed loop. The sliding-mode observer, measurements currents and the terminal voltages are implemented with the same sampling period (100 s). The algorithm has been generated by code compose studio (CCS) version 2.2. This extends the basic

m2 m1 m0

si si

m3 m2

si m1   s  , m
i 1

si si si

m 0 m 1 m 2

Figure 8 Experimental set-up 358 & The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2008

s i , m 3

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Figure 10 Phase a current Ia obtained experimentally

Figure 11 Phase a current Ia obtained in simulation

where m0 0:1, m1 1, m2 1:6 and n0 0:01, n1 0:5 and n2 0:8. The above sign function is depicted in Fig. 13. Fig. 14 shows the prole of trapezoidal phase-to-phase back-EMF as estimated by the sliding-mode observer. The top trace shows the trapezoidal phase-to-phase back-EMF Eab . The bottom trace depicts the trapezoidal phase-tophase back-EMF Ebc .

Fig. 15 shows the plot of the rotor position. The top gure shows the rotor position measured through the position sensor placed on the shaft of motor. The bottom gure shows the estimated rotor position provided by the observer. It can be observed that the estimated rotor position is in agreement with what is measured directly by the position sensor. These experimental results therefore conrm those obtained in simulation. They make it possible to appreciate

Figure 12 Measured current of BLDC motor (time scale 100 ! 10 ms) IET Electr. Power Appl., 2008, Vol. 2, No. 6, pp. 353 361 doi: 10.1049/iet-epa:20070242 359

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the static and dynamic performances of the observer and show its capability to lter the noises coming from the current sensors.

Conclusions

Figure 13 Sign function

In this paper, a sliding-mode observer design is proposed in order to estimate the trapezoidal back-EMF of a BLDC motor. The estimated back-EMF is, in turn, used to provide an estimation of the rotor position via ZCDs. An estimation of the rotor speed is also provided by exploiting the mathematical relationship between the back-EMF and the rotor speed. The main feature of the proposed observer is that it allows to obtain good estimates of the back-EMF even in the presence of noise and parametric uncertainties; hence attributing to the observer reasonable robustness and ltering characteristics. Simulation and experimental results have conrmed the good convergence and robustness performance of the observer. It also shows the applicability of the observer without inducing any discontinuity in the reconstruction of the state.

References

[1] BECERRA R.C. , JAHNS T.M., EHSANI M. : Four quadrant sensorless brushless ECM drive. IEEE Applied Power Electronics Conf. and Exposition, 1991, pp. 202 209 [2] SHAO J. : Direct back EMF detection method for sensorless brushless DC motor drives, MS thesis, Department of Electrical Engineering, Virginia Polytechnic institute Virginia, September 2003 Figure 14 Estimated phase-to-phase back-EMF (time scale 100 ! 10 ms) [3] OGASAWARA S., AKAGI H. : An approach to position sensorless drive for brushless dc motors, IEEE Trans. Ind. Appl., 1991, 27, (5), pp. 928 933 [4] MOREIRA J.: Indirect sensing for rotor ux position of permanent magnet AC motors operating in a wide speed range. IEEE Industry Application Society Annual Meeting, 1994, pp. 401 407 [5] BEJERKE S.: Digital signal processing solutions for motor control using the TMS320F240DSP-controller. ESIEE, Paris, 1996 [6] SIMON D., FEUCHT D.: Synchronous motor phase control by vector addition of induced winding voltages, IEEE Trans. Ind. Electron., 2004, 51, (3), pp. 537 544 [7] TERZIC B., JADRIC M.: Design and implementation of the extended Kalman lter for the speed and rotor position estimation of brushless DC motor, IEEE Trans. Ind. Electron., 2001, 48, (6), pp. 1065 1073 Figure 15 Estimated and actual rotor position (time scale 100 ! 10 ms) 360 & The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2008 [8] KENJO T., NAGAMORI S.: Permanent magnet and brushless DC motors (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1985) IET Electr. Power Appl., 2008, Vol. 2, No. 6, pp. 353 361 doi: 10.1049/iet-epa:20070242

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[9] MILLER T.J.E.: Brushless permanent magnet and reluctance motor drives (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1989) [10] FAKHAM H., DJEMAI M., BLAZEVIC P.: Sliding modes observer for position and speed estimations in brushless DC motor (BLDC motor). IEEE ICIT, Tunisia, 2004 [11] DJEMAI M. , BARBOT J.P., GLUMINEAU A., BOISLIVEAU R. : ` Observateur a modes glissants pour la machine asynchrone. APII-JESA-36, Commande et Observation, 2002, pp. 657 667

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