Int. J. Elec&Electr.Eng&Telecoms.

2013

S Prakash and R Dhanasekaran, 2013 ISSN 2319 2518 www.ijeetc.com Vol. 2, No. 1, January 2013 2013 IJEETC. All Rights Reserved

Research Paper

COMPARISON OF CLOSED LOOP CONTROLLED BUCK CONVERTER FED PMBLDC DRIVE SYSTEMS WITH AND WITHOUT SNUBBER
S Prakash1* and R Dhanasekaran2

*Corresponding Author: S Prakash, prakash_srinivasan@rediffmail.com

Permanent Magnet Brushless DC Motor (PMBLDC) is one of the best electrical drives that has increasing popularity, due to their high efficiency, reliability, good dynamic response and very low maintenance. This makes the interest of modeling an ideal PMBLDC motor and its associated Drive System in simple and lucid manner. In this paper the drive system is proposed with a buck converter topology. It has the advantages of reduced switching losses, low inductor power loss, reduced ripple by using a pi-filter, which in turn makes the DC link voltage to be stable. A Snubber consists of a resistor and capacitor, where the resistor is connected in parallel with a diode. The voltage across the capacitance cannot change instantaneously, but it increases exponentially. So the critical rate of rise of voltage is slowed down. The capacitor stores the energy, Hence same output can be obtained for reduced input. This improves motor efficiency. Snubber Circuit has the advantages of reduced switching losses, great impact on control of dv/dt and di/dt, reduced device heating, ripples and voltage transients. The modeling and simulation of the Buck Converter controlled PMBLDC motor drive with and without snubber is done using the software package MATLAB/SIMULINK. The operation principle of the buck converter is analyzed with and without snubber, and the simulation results are presented in this paper to verify the theoretical analysis.
Keywords: Permanent Magnet Brushless DC (PMBLDC) motor, Drive, Converter, Filters, Snubbers

INTRODUCTION
Permanent magnet Brushless DC (BLDC) motor is increasingly used in automotive, industrial, and household products because of its high efficiency, high torque, ease of control,
1 2

and lower maintenance (Krishnan, 2003), (Krishnan and Shiyoung, 1997). A BLDC motor is designed to utilize the trapezoidal back EMF with square wave currents to generate the constant torque. A conventional BLDC motor

St. Peters University, EEE Department, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. Syed Ammal Engineering College, Ramanathapuram, Tamil Nadu, India.

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drive is generally implemented via a six-switch, three phase inverter (Rahul et al., 2003) and Position sensors that provide six commutation points for each electrical cycle. Cost minimization is the key factor in an especially fractional horse-power BLDC motor drive for Home applications. It is usually achieved by elimination of the drive components such as power switches and sensors. Therefore effective methodology should be discussed for the desired performance and the relevant drive system which in turn controls the motor for all its defined applications with high efficiency, as well as good in maintaining the speed for variable torque. The mathematical modeling of DC to DC converter is given by Muo (2004) and Luo and Ye (2005). Voltage provided to the motor is fed by high side switch, so that its average value may be altered by changing the switch on period. Here keeping the average voltage across the motor constant whatever may be the load condition by correcting the duty cycle. The motor output is taken as feedback through PI Controller and the corresponding signal is going to control the High Side Switch duty cycle. The purpose of the inductor is to oppose a change in current. The larger you make the inductor, the less its current changes. This changing current flows in to the low reactance of the capacitor, charging it. The first capacitor offers low reactance to the AC component and it offers infinite resistance to the DC component. As a result the capacitor shunts an appreciable amount of the AC component while the DC component continues its journey to the inductor L. The inductor L offers high reactance to the AC component but it offers almost zero resistance
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to the DC component. As a result the DC component flows through the inductor while the AC component is blocked. The Second capacitor bypasses the AC component which the inductor had failed to block. As a result only the DC component appears across the load .The objective of the present work is to model and simulate buck converter fed PMBLDC drive systems with and without snubber.

PMBLDC MOTOR
The brushless DC motor is actually a permanent magnet AC motor whose torquecurrent characteristics mimic the DC motor. Instead of commutating the armature current using brushes, electronic commutation is used. Having the armature on the stator makes it easy to conduct heat away from the windings, and if desired, having cooling arrangement for the armature windings is much easier as compared to a DC motor. A BLDC is a modified PMSM with the modification being that the back-emf is trapezoidal instead of being sinusoidal as in the case of PMSM (Luk and Lee, 1994). The position of the rotor can be sensed by hall effect position sensors, namely Hall_A, Hall_B, and Hall_C, each having a lag of 120 w.r.t the earlier one. Three Hall position sensors are used to determine the position of the rotor field. Model of a BLDC motor Since a BLDC motor is easy to control, it is the motor of choice in many applications requiring precise control of speed (ByoungKuk et al., 2003; and Atef and Al-Mashakbeh, 2009). PMBLDC motor with new power converter topology is given by Krishnan (1997). Four switch three phase brushless motor for low cost commercial applications is given by Lee

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Int. J. Elec&Electr.Eng&Telecoms. 2013

S Prakash and R Dhanasekaran, 2013

(2003). The above literature does not deal with Simulation of Buck Converter fed PMBLDC drive system with and without snubber. This work proposes buck converter with and without snubber for PMBLDC Drive Systems.

Input voltage Buck output voltage

: 48 V DC : 24 V DC

Pulse width to Buck MOSFET : 0.5 duty cycle (50%) Toff : 50% Pulse width (33%) to Inverter MOSFET: 120 mode of operation. Parameters of BLDC Motor The inverter is a MOSFET bridge. Stator resistance Rs Stator Inductance Ls Back EMF Flat area Inertia Friction factor Pole pairs : 2.8750 ohms : 8.5e-3 Henrys : 120 degrees : 0.8 103 : 1 103 :4

SIMULATION RESULTS
Closed loop system is simulated using Matlab Simulink. The Simulink model of closed loop controlled buck converter fed PMBLDC drive system without and with snubber, which is shown in Figure 1a and Figure 2a. Here 48 V DC is stepped down to 24 V DC using a buck converter. The output of buck converter is filtered using pi-filter. The output of the pi-filter is applied to the three phase inverter, the inverter produces three phase voltage required by the PMBLDC motor. The technical specifications of the drive systems are as follows:

Flux induced by magnets : 0.175 Webers

Figure 1a: Simulink Diagram of Closed Loop System Without Snubber

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S Prakash and R Dhanasekaran, 2013

Stator windings are connected in star to an internal neutral point. The actual speed is measured and it is compared with the reference speed, the error is given to the PI Controller, the output of the PI

controller is one of the inputs to the comparator. The other input is high frequency triangular wave. The output of the comparator controls the pulse width applied to the buck MOSFET. The pulses given to the MOSFETS 1, 3 and 5 are shown in Figure 1b.

Figure 1b: Triggering Pulses

Figure 1c: DC Input Voltage

DC input voltage is shown in Figure 1c and its value is 48 volts. Phase voltages of the three phase inverter are shown in Figure 1d. The voltages are displaced by
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120. Three phase currents drawn by the motor are shown in Figure 1e. The speed settles at 130 rpm, which is equal to the set value.

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Int. J. Elec&Electr.Eng&Telecoms. 2013

S Prakash and R Dhanasekaran, 2013

Figure 1d: Phase Voltages of Inverter

Figure 1e: Output Currents of Inverter

Figure 2a: Simulink Diagram of Closed Loop System with Snubber

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S Prakash and R Dhanasekaran, 2013

Figure 2b: Phase Voltages of Inverter with Snubber

Figure 2c: Output Currents of Inverter with Snubber

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S Prakash and R Dhanasekaran, 2013

Figure 2d: Inverter Phase Voltage Without Snubber and with Snubber

Figure 2e: Inverter Output Current Without Snubber and with Snubber

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S Prakash and R Dhanasekaran, 2013

CONCLUSION
Closed loop Buck controlled PMBLDC drive systems with and without snubber is modeled and simulated using MATLAB/SIMULINK and the results are presented. Buck converter is proposed to reduce the input voltage to the required value. Pi-filter is proposed at the output of the buck converter to reduce the ripple. This drive system has advantages like reduced number of switches and improved response. The scope of this paper is modeling and simulation of closed loop Buck controlled PMBLDC drive system with and without snubber. The hardware implementation is yet to be done. The contribution of authors is the development of new simulink model for buck converter fed PMBLDC motor drive.

Control, IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics , APEC, Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 428-433. 3. Krishnan R (July 2003), A Text Book on Electric Motor Drives, Modelling, Analysis and Control, Prentice Hall of India Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi. 4. Krishnan R and Shiyoung Lee (July/ August 1997), PM Brushless DC Motor Drive with a New Power-Converter Topology, IEEE Transactions on Industry Applications , Vol. 33, No. 4, pp. 973-982. 5. Luk P C K and Lee C K (March 1994), Efficient Modeling for a Brushless DC Motor Drive, 20 th International Conference on Industrial Electronics, Control and Instrumentation, Vol. 1, pp. 188-191, IECON94. 6. Luo F L and Ye H (March 2005), Energy Factor and Mathematical Modeling for Power dc-dc Converters, Proc. Inst. Elect. Eng., Vol. 152, No. 2, pp. 191-198. 7. Muo E L (November 2004), Mathematical Modelling for Power dc-dc Converters, IEEE International Conference, pp. 323-328, Powercon04, Singapore. 8. Rahul Khopkar, Madani S M, Masoud Hajiaghajani and Hamid A Toliyat (June 2003), A Low Cost BLDC Motor Drive Using Buck-Boost Converter for Residential and Commercial Applications, IEEE International Conference on Electric Machines and Drives, Vol. 2, pp. 1251-1257, IEMDC03.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The experiment was conducted in power electronics laboratory, St. Peters University. The authors would like to thank Head of the Department, Electrical Engineering, St. Peters University for providing the facilities.

REFERENCES
1. Atef Saleh Othman and Al-Mashakbeh (2009), Proportional Integral and Derivative Control of Brushless DC Motor, European Journal of Scientific Research, Vol. 35, No. 2, pp. 198-203, ISSN 1450-216X. 2. Byoung-KukLee, Tae-Hyung Kim and Mehrdad Ehsani (January 2001), On the Feasibility of Four-Switch Three Phase BLDC Motor Drives for Low Cost Commercial Applications Topology and

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