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AbstractIn this paper, a novel drive method, which is different from the traditional motor drive techniques, for high-speed
brushless DC (BLDC) motor is proposed and verified by a series
of experiments. It is well known that the BLDC motor can be
driven by either pulse-width modulation (PWM) techniques with
a constant dc-link voltage or pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM)
techniques with an adjustable dc-link voltage. However, to our best
knowledge, there is rare study providing a proper drive method for
a high-speed BLDC motor with a large power over a wide speed
range. Therefore, the detailed theoretical analysis comparison of
the PWM control and the PAM control for high-speed BLDC motor
is first given. Then, a conclusion that the PAM control is superior
to the PWM control at high speed is obtained because of decreasing the commutation delay and high-frequency harmonic wave.
Meanwhile, a new high-speed BLDC motor drive method based
on the hybrid approach combining PWM and PAM is proposed.
Finally, the feasibility and effectiveness of the performance analysis comparison and the new drive method are verified by several
experiments.
Index TermsBrushless DC (BLDC) motor, commutation delay,
drive method, high-speed, pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM).
I. INTRODUCTION
ECENTLY, high-speed brushless DC (BLDC) motor,
which is with the advantages of high efficiency, compactness, low cost, and maintenance compared with the traditional
brush dc motor [1][3], is getting more and more interest in
industrial automation area, especially on blowers and compressors. Because the rotation speed of high-speed motor can reach
up to tens of thousands revolutions per minute (r/min) due to
the development of bearing technology [4], [5], a proper drive
method to ensure low loss and high efficiency in a wide speed
range is a critical issue.
Generally, the BLDC motor can be driven by either pulsewidth modulation (PWM) or pulse-amplitude modulation
(PAM) techniques. However, it is well known that the inverter,
which is applied to most of the BLDC motor drive systems,
Manuscript received March 17, 2014; revised June 14, 2014 and August 19,
2014; accepted October 1, 2014. Date of publication October 8, 2014; date of
current version April 15, 2015. This work was supported in part by the National
Nature Science Funds of China under Grant 61374029 and Grant 61403015,
and in part by the National Major Project for the Development and Application of Scientific Instrument Equipment of China under Grant 2012YQ040235.
Recommended for publication by Associate Editor P. C. Loh. (Corresponding
author: G. Liu).
C. Cui and K. Wang are with the School of Instrumentation Science
and Optoelectronics Engineering, BeiHang University, Beijing100191, China
(e-mail: cuichenjunupc@163.com; wangkunggg@163.com).
G. Liu is with the School of Instrumentation Science and Optoelectronics
Engineering, BeiHang University, Beijing100191, China (e-mail: lgang@buaa.
edu.cn).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TPEL.2014.2361752
0885-8993 2014 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
CUI et al.: NOVEL DRIVE METHOD FOR HIGH-SPEED BRUSHLESS DC MOTOR OPERATING IN A WIDE RANGE
interruption caused by the commutation and limitation of the resolution of PWM generator, more torque ripple can be produced
in the performance of PWM-controlled BLDC motor drives.
This phenomenon will become more serious when the motors
work at high speed. Moreover, it will lead to high motor loss.
But it does not give enough theoretical analysis. The advantages
and disadvantages of PWM and PAM are assessed in [24] using
BLDC motor drives which are applied to the refrigerator. The
result shows that the PAM control can provide higher efficiency
than the PWM control. However, it only gives several low-power
experimental results without any detailed analysis. A so-called
PAM/PWM method [25] is proposed to control the adjustable
speed drives. The realization of PAM relies on a current source
rectifier which adjusts the dc-link voltage. As compared to the
conventional PWM inverter with a constant dc-link voltage, this
method can reduce the dc-link current ripples and prolong the
lifetime of the capacitor effectively. However, the performance
of controlling a BLDC motor is not involved. In order to improve
the motor efficiency and provide the desired current waveform,
a quasi-current source inverter is employed in [26] to adjust the
dc-link voltage. The high-speed performance is improved, but
the analysis and performance comparison with the PWM control are not mentioned. A PWM-controlled buck-type dc-to-dc
power converter in front of the three-phase bridge inverter is
employed for the low-inductance and low-power BLDC motor [27][29]. The variable dc voltage is adjusted by the buck
converter, and the inverter legs participate only in commutation
instead of involved in modulation. But the detailed analysis is
not discussed although the power consumption is reduced.
To the best knowledge of the authors, the detailed analysis of
whether the PWM control is suitable for the high-speed BLDC
motor in a large speed range or not has not been fully investigated. Therefore, it attracts the authors to give the analysis
and performance comparison between the PWM control and
the PAM control at high-speed region, thus providing a proper
drive method in a wide speed range.
In this paper, the theoretical analysis comparison between the
PWM control and the PAM control at high-speed region is first
given. Then, a new BLDC motor drive method over a wide speed
range based on the analysis results is proposed. Therefore, the
organization of this paper is as follows. Section II describes the
detailed analysis about the advantages and disadvantages of the
PWM control and the PAM control. Section III presents the new
high-speed BLDC motor drive method. Section IV introduces
the experimental results to validate the effectiveness and feasibility of the performance comparison analysis and the new drive
method. Some important conclusions can be found in Section V.
II. PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS COMPARISON BETWEEN
THE PWM CONTROL AND THE PAM CONTROL
The criteria of the performance comparison include the commutation delay analysis, harmonic component analysis, and motor power factor analysis.
A. Commutation Delay Analysis
In this paper, TI TMS320F28335 digital signal processor
(DSP) is taken as the controller to generate the PWM signals.
Fig. 1.
4999
5000
(1)
360
t
Tk
(2)
2E sin(t) = Em ax sin(t)
=
e
Af
Fig. 2. Adopted drive circuit structure for high-speed BLDC motor control.
u d is the output voltage of the rectifier, eA , eB , and eC are the back-EMFs,
R is the phase-winding resistance, L is the phase-winding inductance, N is
the neutral point, S is the virtual neutral point, O is the midpoint of the dc
bus, and the voltage between S and O is used to generated the sensorless
commutation signals [30].
Fig. 3.
(5)
where uABf is the fundamental wave of uAB , Um ax is the maximum value of uABf , 0 M 1 is the modulation ratio, and
is the angle between uABf and eAf .
The scheme of the PWM generator is shown in Fig. 3, where
1 and 2 can be described as
M sin(t+)
1 =
2
2
sin(t+)
2 = +
.
2
2
(6)
CUI et al.: NOVEL DRIVE METHOD FOR HIGH-SPEED BRUSHLESS DC MOTOR OPERATING IN A WIDE RANGE
M n
n
sin(t + ) +
sin
cos (ns t) (7)
2
2
5001
Fig. 4. Equivalent circuit of the fundamental wave and the harmonic wave.
(a) Fundamental wave equivalent circuit. (b) Harmonic wave equivalent circuit.
M n
2
n
sin t
+ +
sin
cos(ns t) .
2
3
2
(8)
Therefore, uAB can be expressed as
uAB = uAO uBO = uABf + uABh
(9)
where uABf and uABh are the fundamental wave and the harmonic wave of uAB , respectively.
From (7)(9), uABf and uABh can be described as
ud
2
uABf =
M sin(t + ) M sin t +
2
3
3
1
=
M ud sin t + +
(10)
2
6
ud
4
M n
(n +1)/2
(1)
Jk
2 n =1
n
2
k =2
k
sin (k ns )t + k
2 sin
3
3
(n = 1, 3, 5, . . . , k = 2, 4, 6, . . . , )
uABh =
(11)
u
4
M
n
(1)n /2
Jk
2 n =2
n
2
k =1
k
cos (k ns )t + k
2 sin
3
3
(k = 1, 3, 5, . . . , n = 2, 4, 6, . . . , )
where Jk is the k-order Bessel function.
From (11), we can see that the harmonic waves with the
frequency of k ns are introduced because of the PWM
control.
The equivalent circuit of the fundamental wave and the harmonic wave are shown in Fig. 4(a) and (b), respectively. It can
be seen that the distorted voltage uABh will induce the distorted
current iABh , which will inevitably increase the copper loss of
the motor. It is well known that the iron loss of the motor also
increases with the frequency. Therefore, the harmonic wave will
increase both the copper loss and the iron loss.
C. Motor Power Factor Analysis
The vector diagram illustrating the relationship between uAB
and iAB (iAB = iA ) after the transfer is shown in Fig. 5.
Fig. 5. Vector diagram about the relationship between u A B and iA B after the
transfer.
(12)
(13)
U1 I1 cos 1 +
n
h=2
UI
Uh Ih cos h
(14)
where PF is the power factor, P is the active power, S is the apparent power, and 1 = 1 + is the displacement factor angle.
U is the RMS magnitude of the line-to-line voltage and U1 is the
RMS magnitude of the fundamental component, I is the RMS
magnitude of the total current and I1 is the RMS magnitude
of the fundamental component, Uh is the RMS magnitude of
the line-to-line voltage harmonic component and Ih is the RMS
magnitude of the current harmonic component, and h is the
angle between Uh and Ih .
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TABLE I
MOTOR PARAMETERS
Surface Mounted BLDC Motor
Rated DC voltage
Rated current
Rated speed, n
Number of pole pairs, P
Phase resistance, R
Phase inductance, L
Line-to-line back-EMF constant, K e -l i n e
Moment of inertia, J
Fig. 6.
480 V
218 A
32 000 r/min
2
1.5 m
0.053 mH
0.0127 V/ r/min
0.024059 kgm2
The first term, i.e., U1 I1 cos1 , shows the main power term,
which is associated with the fundamental frequency. The second
(summation) term accounts for the harmonics powers absorbed
by the loads and other system components. Because of the PWM
control, the lag angle and the harmonic component decrease
the power factor. It is well known that when the active power
is constant, the small power factor will increase the reactive
power, apparent power, and motor loss.
III. PROPOSED DRIVE METHOD
A. Drive Circuit Selection of High-Speed BLDC Motor
As analyzed above, the PAM control for the BLDC motor
can provide less motor loss and higher efficiency than the PWM
control at high speed. So the PAM control should be employed,
especially at high speed. However, from the specification of the
experimental BLDC motor as shown in Table I, it is interesting
to find that the phase-winding resistance and the phase-winding
inductance of high-speed BLDC motor are far smaller than those
of the common low-speed BLDC motor. When the motor starts,
the initial DC voltage of the three-phase inverter should be
smaller enough to limit the startup current, as the back-EMF
is too small to counteract a large dc voltage at the very low
speed. Therefore, a suitable drive circuit should be first selected
to reduce the initial dc voltage and guarantee the safe motor
starting process. During the experimental process, the authors
have tried three drive circuit structures to limit the startup current
as shown in Figs. 2, 6, and 7.
Fig. 6 shows the common drive circuit structure for the BLDC
motor control. The dc voltage, i.e., the output voltage of the
three-phase uncontrolled rectifier, is more than 500 V. Though
the three-phase inverter is controlled by the PWM scheme for
reducing the voltage, the startup current is still far larger than the
Fig. 7. Drive circuit structure based on the dcdc converter for the BLDC
motor control.
CUI et al.: NOVEL DRIVE METHOD FOR HIGH-SPEED BRUSHLESS DC MOTOR OPERATING IN A WIDE RANGE
Fig. 9.
Fig. 8.
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phase-winding resistance and phase-winding inductance. Therefore, if we want to take the PAM control in a wide speed range,
the range of dc-link voltage should be expanded at medium and
low speed. Meanwhile, a front-end PWM-controlled dcdc converter as shown in Fig. 7 is needed to produce such a low dc
voltage. But the complexity of the system design is increased as
explained above.
The second one is that, to our best knowledge, the PWM
control is the auxiliary drive method of high-speed BLDC motor,
while the PAM control is the main drive method, since the highspeed region is the most common working range. The aim of the
PWM control is merely to guarantee that the high-speed motor
can be accelerated to a high speed. Therefore, the operation time
of the PWM control is far shorter than that of the PAM control,
thus mitigating the disadvantage of the PWM control. However,
both the two drive methods are indispensable.
The transition process between PWM and PAM is achieved
by a hysteresis comparator expressed as
1, (n(k + 1) > n+ )
(15)
(n(k + 1)) = (n(k)), (n n(k + 1) n+ )
0, (n(k + 1) < n )
where (n(k + 1)) is the (k + 1)th hysteresis comparator output value, (n(k)) is the (k)th hysteresis comparator output value,
n and n+ are the two endpoint speeds of the hysteresis comparator, n(k + 1) is the (k + 1)th calculated speed value, and
n(k) is the (k)th calculated speed value.
The hysteresis loop schematic diagram is shown in Fig. 8. The
region between n and n+ is defined as the transition region.
If (n(k + 1)) = 1, the PAM control mode will start to work,
while if (n(k + 1)) = 0, the PWM control mode will start to
work.
Fig. 10.
(19)
where uAN , uBN , and uCN are the three phase voltages.
Let us assume that VT1 and VT6 are switched ON, i.e.,
phases A and B are conducted simultaneously with iA = iB
and iC = 0. So the equivalent circuit can be shown in Fig. 9.
(20)
It can be deduced from [29] that the commutation delay induced by the PWM control will lead to a serious torque ripple.
So when the drive method transfers from the PWM control to
the PAM control, a torque ripple, TM , will be introduced, and
(18) can be expressed as
TM + TM TZ =J
2 dn
d
=
J .
dt
60 dt
(21)
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Fig. 11.
Waveform of iA and u A B at different speeds. (a) PWM n = 6000 r/min. (b) PWM n = 24000 r/min. (c) PAM n = 24000 r/min.
n = t
(22)
CUI et al.: NOVEL DRIVE METHOD FOR HIGH-SPEED BRUSHLESS DC MOTOR OPERATING IN A WIDE RANGE
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Fig. 14. Information of the losses at 24 000 r/min under PWM control and
PAM control, respectively. (a) PWM control. (b) PAM control.
Fig. 15. Waveforms of iA and u A B at 3000 and 5000 r/min under PWM
control. (a) Unloaded condition at 3000 r/min. (b) Loaded condition at 3000
r/min. (c) Unloaded condition at 5000 r/min. (d) Loaded condition at 5000 r/min.
Fig. 13. Experimental comparisons of the motor power factor and the motor
efficiency under PWM control and PAM control. (a) Power factor. (b) Overall
efficiency.
Fig. 16. Waveforms of iA and u A B in the transition process between the PWM
control and the PAM control. (a) Unloaded condition with proper hysteresis
width. (b) Loaded condition with proper hysteresis width. (c) Loaded condition
with improper hysteresis width.
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Fig. 17. Waveform of iA , u A B , and u d at 15 000 and 24 000 r/min. (a) PAM control at 15 000 r/min. (b) PAM control at 24 000 r/min. (c) PWM control at
24 000 r/min.
CUI et al.: NOVEL DRIVE METHOD FOR HIGH-SPEED BRUSHLESS DC MOTOR OPERATING IN A WIDE RANGE
invariable dc voltage. On the other hand, the distorted waveforms will increase the motor loss and decrease the motor
efficiency.
V. CONCLUSION
The detailed theoretical analysis comparison of the PWM
control and the PAM control for high-speed BLDC motor is
presented. The criteria for performance comparison include
the commutation delay analysis, harmonic component analysis,
and motor power factor analysis. Meanwhile, a new high-speed
BLDC motor drive method is proposed. It has been shown that
the PAM control is superior to the PWM control for providing
good performance at high speed by several experiment results.
Unfortunately, the performance comparison between the PWM
control and the PAM control at low speed cannot be provided
due to the limited experimental condition. However, this disadvantage can be mitigated since the common work speed of the
magnetically suspended motor in actual application is between
12 000 and 35 000 r/min.
In addition, it is noted that the experiment at 32 000 r/min
requires further follow-up test for the following two reasons:
one is the coupling resulting in changes in the rotor mode which
affects the stability of the magnetic bearing suspended. The
other is the limited power of the generator load resistance which
cannot endure high power.
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