A Study on the Start-up Control for HDD Spindle Motors

HDD 스핀들 모터의 초기 구동 제어에 관한 연구

Optimization method for the open loop commutation time intervals in HDD spindle start-up control is presented in this paper. A hard disk drive(HDD) uses a sensorless brushless DC motor(BLDC) for the platter rotation. Because there is no direct sensor for the rotor position, open loop commutations after sensing the rotor position at a standstill using inductive sensing method are performed to speed up the rotor up to a certain speed where the zero crossings of the back electromotive force(EMF) are measurable. Therefore successful open loop commutations are necessary for the stable start-up control of the spindle motors. Random neighborhood search(RNS) algorithm is introduced as a optimization technic in this paper. Rotor speed and its standard deviation are used as a cost function and commutation intervals obtained from the spindle motion equation are used as initial parameter values for the RNS. With the help of the proposed method optimized open loop commutation time intervals for the very low start-up current are acquired and tested. The experimental results shows that the proposed method can decrease the start-up failure rate of a HDD spindle motor.