Novel PWM Method with Low Ripple Current for Position Control Applications of BLDC Motors

BLDC Motors are widely used in various speed control applications due to their ease of control and low cost. Generally, the unipolar PWM method is used for speed control applications. However, the unipolar PWM method has a current spike problem in the braking operation which can be a problem in speed reversal which generally happens in position control applications. However, the current spike problem can be solved by the conventional bipolar PWM method. Although the current spike problem can be solved, the conventional bipolar PWM method has the problem of a large current ripple. In this paper, a novel bipolar PWM method is proposed to solve this problem. The current ripple and the current spike problems are analyzed in this paper for the unipolar and bipolar PWM methods. At last, the merits of the proposed bipolar PWM method are proven by experiment.