Unknown input observer for a novel sensorless drive of brushless DC motors

In this paper, a novel motor control method is proposed to improve the performance of sensorless drive of BLDC motors. In the terminal voltage sensing method, which is a great portion of sensorless control, a precise rotor position cannot be obtained when excessive input is applied to the drive during synchronous operation mode. Especially in the transient state, the response characteristic decreases. To cope with this problem, the unknown input (back-EMF) is modelled as the additional state of system in this paper. Taking into account the disturbance adopted by the back-EMF, the observer can be obtained by an equation of the augmented system. An algorithm to detect the back-EMF of a BLDC motor using the state observer is constructed. As a result, a novel sensorless drive of BLDC motors that can strictly estimate rotor position and speed is proposed.