Sensorless Detection of Position and Speed in Brushless DC Motors using the Derivative of Terminal Phase Voltages Technique with a Simple and Versatile Motor Driver Implementation

The detection of position and speed in BLDC motors without using position sensors has meant many efforts for the last decades. The aim of this paper is to develop a sensorless technique for detecting the position and speed of BLDC motors, and to overcome the drawbacks of position sensor-based methods by improving the performance of traditional approaches oriented to motor phase voltage sensing. The position and speed information is obtained by computing the derivative of the terminal phase voltages regarding to a virtual neutral point. For starting-up the motor and implementing the algorithms of the detection technique, a FPGA board with a real-time processor is used. Also, a versatile hardware has been developed for driving BLDC motors through pulse width modulation (PWM) signals. Delta and wye winding motors have been considered for evaluating the performance of the designed hardware and software, and tests with and without load are performed. Experimental results for validating the detection technique were attained in the range 5-1500 rpm and 5-150 rpm under no-load and full-load conditions, respectively. Specifically, speed and position square errors lower than 3 rpm and between 10º-30º were obtained without load. In addition, the speed and position errors after full-load tests were around 1 rpm and between 10º-15º, respectively. These results provide the evidence that the developed technique allows to detect the position and speed of BLDC motors with low accuracy errors at starting-up and over a wide speed range, and reduce the influence of noise in position sensing, which suggest that it can be satisfactorily used as a reliable alternative to position sensors in precision applications.