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CHAPTER 7

CONCLUSION AND SCOPE FOR FURTHER WORK

7.1 CONCLUSION

BLDC motors are appealing candidates for many high performance

applications, because of their attractive characteristics, such as power density,
torque-to-inertia ratio, power efficiency, robustness and reliability. A brief
review of the recent developments in the field of BLDC motor drives,
sensorless control techniques and AI techniques for the speed control of
BLDC motor drives, were discussed in the literature survey, which clearly
highlighted the need for the performance enhancement of the BLDC motor
drive. The objectives of the research work and the chapter wise organization
of the thesis are presented.

A simplified simulation model of the BLDC motor drive with hall

sensors was developed, using Matlab/Simulink to carry out the simulation
studies. The simulation model of the BLDC motor consists of several sub
blocks, like the current and voltage equations block, torque equation block
and hall sensor block, which also includes the inverter and switching logic
control. This model was used for analyzing the transient and steady state
behavior of the drive.

The responses of the BLDC motor drive during starting, the load
perturbations, the change in the set speed and speed reversal, were studied and
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compared with the ideal waveforms and also with the waveforms available in
the literature. The results of the simplified simulation model were compared
with those obtained from the hardware setup. It is found from the studies that,
the performance of the simulation model matches well with the experimental
results. The motor model has been considered to evaluate the performance of
the sensorless control technique and other AI control techniques.

In recent times, as the sensorless control technique for the BLDC

motor drives have gained popularity due to its advantages, a sensorless
controlled BLDC motor drive was chosen for the study. The literature survey
showed that, the back emf zero crossing detection technique is superior, and
widely used by the motor drives industry. Since the work is focused only on
studies of AI controller techniques for BLDC motors, the sensorless control
technique based on the back emf zero crossing was considered for the study.

The simplified simulation model developed for the BLDC motor

drive has been extended to obtain a sensorless speed control, using zero
crossing of the back emf. The BLDC motor drive consists of a PI speed
controller and current controller. A detailed analysis was carried out on the
sensorless controlled BLDC motor under different operating conditions that
includes starting, load perturbations and changes in the set speed. The
simplified simulation model was validated with a hardware setup. The
responses were compared with the waveforms available in the literature, and
also with the waveforms obtained using hall sensors, to prove the
effectiveness of the simplified modelling. The simulation and hardware
results matched closely. Hence, the sensorless model was further used in the
study of the proposed AI controller to improve the dynamic performance of
the BLDC motor drive.
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The Genetic Algorithm is used in the optimal tuning of the gains of

the PI controller. With the application of GA in the optimization of the gains
of the PI controller, the following observations have been made.

When the GA was applied for the direct tuning of the PI controller,
the speed response of the drive was better than the PI controller in terms of
the integral of absolute error, rise time and settling time. The GA tuned PI
controller showed good improvement in the performance, when compared
with the manually tuned PI controller in terms of the time domain
specifications; but it requires automatic adjustment of the controller gains to
adapt to the dynamic operating conditions.

When the BLDC motor drives are applied to variable speed

applications, the speed response of the drive is seriously affected by unknown
disturbances and sudden variations of the parameters. Therefore, the
controllers in this category of the drive systems should be adaptable to any
sudden changes in the system, and should also have a variable control
structure. Hence, an SFLC was designed to overcome the drawbacks of the PI
controller.

A simple FLC was designed to study the direct impact of the FLC
on the speed responses of the BLDC motor drive. A comparison of the simple
FLC with the PI controller showed, that the FLC gave a poor performance
when compared with the PI controller. The speed response was oscillatory in
nature with an overshoot and takes more than 3 seconds to reach the steady
state. The only transient in which, the SFLC is superior to the PI controller is
its performance during the load perturbations. It takes a comparatively lesser
time to reach the set speed. It is concluded that the SFLC cannot be used as
such in motor control applications which needs proper tuning.
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The responses of the drive with PI controller and SFLC were

evaluated and their performances were compared. The PI controller showed
an improvement in the performance only for the design case, but, it suffers for
the other operating conditions. The SFL controller has an overshoot of 25%
of the rated speed, but the time taken for the computation is less,
comparatively. Hence, both the PI and SFL controller require optimal tuning
for further improving the performance of the drive.

A modified self tuning mechanism of the FL Controller with the

proper selection of the Membership functions, Fuzzy logic rules and input and
output Scaling Factor for tuning of the FLC were discussed in detail. In the
modified self tuned FLC, the initial values of the controller are optimally
obtained by the trial and error method. It also increases the computational
burden, as an additional rule base is required for the self tuning.

An improved GA based optimal tuning of the FLC parameters for

the performance enhancement of the BLDC motor drive has been proposed.
In the process of determining the parameters of the FLC using the GA, many
independent trials are performed to obtain an optimal value. Before starting
the selection process, the parameters of the GA were determined and declared
in the GA process. The responses of the drive with the FL based self tuning
mechanism are compared with those of the proposed GA based control
scheme for three different speed ranges, and load perturbations for different
set speed.

The Genetic Algorithm, when used in the designing of fuzzy rules,

scaling factors and the membership functions showed a 25 % improvement in
the performance of the BLDC motor drive. Hence, it is concluded that the
improved GA based FLC showed an improvement in the performance, in
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terms of the better computational time, and integral of absolute error, rise
time, overshoot and settling time of a BLDC motor drive.

7.2 SCOPE FOR FURTHER WORK

The results and issues identified during the course of this work give
rise to a number of possible directions for the future work. Some of them are
briefly summarized below.

The hardware realization of the proposed GA based optimally tuned

FL controller can be implemented, to reduce the time taken for getting the
responses. The other AI techniques like neural network and particle swarm
techniques can be used to optimize the parameters of the speed controller.
This controller can also be used for the sensorless direct torque control of the
BLDC motor drive to study its performance. The GA tuned FL controller can
also be introduced to control the speed of a permanent magnet sinusoidal
motor drives and also for the torque ripple minimization.