Wide-range Speed Control Scheme of BLDC Motor Based on the Hall Sensor Signal

This paper presents a wide-range speed control scheme of brushless DC (BLDC) motors based on a hall sensor with separated low- and normal-speed controllers. However, the use of the hall sensor signal is insufficient to detect motor speed in the low-speed region because of low sensor resolution and time delay. In the proposed method, a micro-stepping current control method according to the torque angle variation is presented. In this mode, the motor current frequency and rotating angle are determined by the reference speed without the actual speed fed by the hall sensor. The detected torque angle is used to adjust the current value in a limited band to control the current value in accordance with the load. The torque angle is detected exactly at the changing point of the hall sensor signal. The rotor can follow the rotating flux with the variable torque angle. In a normal speed range, the conventional vector control scheme is used to control the motor current with a PI speed controller using the hall sensor. The torque characteristics are analyzed on the basis of the back EMF and current shape. To adopt the vector control scheme, the continuous rotor position is estimated by the measured speed and hall sensor position. At the mode changing point between low and normal speed range, the proper initial current command and reference rotor position are calculated. The calculated current command can reduce the torque ripple during transient mode. The proposed method is simple but effective in extending the speed control range of a conventional BLDC motor with hall sensor without the need for a high-resolution encoder. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by various experiments on a practical BLDC motor.