A Direct Redundancy approach to Fault Tolerant Control of BLDC Motor with a damaged Hall-effect Sensor

 ABSTRACT:

 Often for closed loop operation of a Brushless direct current (BLDC) motor, Hall-effect sensors are used and recently theirs been a number of papers discussing Fault Tolerant Control (FTC) of the BLDC motor for a defective Hall-effect sensor. However, so far direct redundancy based approach for FTC of BLDC motor for a position sensor fault is not presented. This paper, contributes a direct redundancy based method by utilizing redundant Hall-effect sensors for FTC of BLDC motor. Redundant Hall-effect sensors generate additional transitions resulting in faster fault detection. To verify the proposed idea, Matlab/Simulink model is developed and the simulation results are presented by programing a Matlab function block acting as a fault tolerant controller. Furthermore, the algorithm is implemented into the MicroLabBox for experimental validation and the results are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

1.      Brushless machines

2.      Fault Tolerant Control

3.      Hall-effect devices

4.      Position measurement

5.       Signal Reconstruction

6.      Redundancy

SOFTWARE: MATLAB/SIMULINK

CONCLUSION:

Transitions of the redundant Hall-effect sensors provide supplementary opportunities to detect faults within electrical 30° or in worst case in electrical 45° and therefore the proposed FTC method results in faster fault compensation times as the experimental results show that the compensation is done in less than electrical 30°. Compared to other FTC methods that use Fourier coefficients and FFT calculations, requiring high end digital signal processors, this method offers less complexity, improved compensation time, and reduces the computational costs, however, use of direct redundancy does increase the system cost slightly. And furthermore, in recent research, for constant speed operation of BLDC motor, the Hall-effect sensor transitions are assumed to be equally spaced, however, experiments showed that transitions are not equally spaced, which makes implementation of the FTC process more complicated. To name a few reasons, there can be misaligned Hall-effect sensors, or cogging torque. Since the redundant sensor method presented here only considers the Hall-effect sensor signals, in that matter, the method presented in this paper offers robustness and simplicity.

REFERENCES:

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