A novel position-sensorless control method for brushless DC motors

This paper presents the design and implementation of a high performance position-sensorless control scheme for the extensively used brushless DC (BLDC) motors. In the proposed method, with proper PWM strategy, instead of detecting the zero-crossing point (ZCP) of the nonexcited motor back electromagnetic force (EMF) or the average motor terminal to neutral voltage, the true zero-crossing points of back EMF are extracted directly from the difference of the specific average line-to-line voltages with simple RC circuits and comparators. In contrast to conventional methods, the neutral voltage is not needed and the diode freewheeling currents in the nonconducted phase are eliminated completely; therefore, the commutation signals are more accurate and insensitive to the common-mode noise. Moreover, 100% pulse-width-modulation (PWM) duty ratio control of BLDC motors is provided with the presented method. As a result, the proposed method makes it possible to achieve good motor performance over a wide speed range and to simplify the starting procedure. The detailed circuit model is analyzed and some experimental results obtained from a sensorless prototype are shown to verify the analysis and confirm the validity of the proposed method. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.