068

Optimal Parameters estimation of a BLDC Motor by Kohonens Self Organizing Map Method
B.Jaganathan,Assistant Professor,
Electrical and Electronics Engineering, SRM University, Chennai, India. jagana78@gmail.com S.Venkatesh, UG Scholar Electrical and Electronics Engineering, SRM University, Chennai, India. naturalvenk@gmail.com
Abstract Brushless DC motors are the widely used motors for they possess many advantages when compared with induction motors such as higher efficiencies, High torque to inertia ratios, Greater speed capabilities, Lower audible noise, Better thermal efficiencies, Lower EMI characteristics, electronically commutated etc., In the design of such advantageous motors it becomes necessary for the estimation of the performance characteristics parameters such as back EMF, stator current, rotor speed, Torque etc., Many ideas have been proposed for the estimation of these characteristic parameters. This paper proposes an unsupervised learning method i.e., Kohonens Self Organizing Feature Map method of estimation of BLDCM drive parameters. Since the method makes use of winner takes it all of neurons, the values obtained by this, will be the optimal values. Simulation of the drive is first performed under ideal conditions and the values of the above mentioned parameters are obtained. Matlab coding is then written for KSOFM which is run and various maps of KSOFM are obtained. The values obtained using these two methods are compared and is found to match with each other. Because of the idea of Winner takes it all and the comparison with the ideal simulation, it can be concluded that the values obtained are optimal. As mentioned Matlab/Simulink is used for the simulation and the results obtained are shown with the inferences. Keywords: Artificial Neural Network, Angular Speed, BLDC Motor, Epoch, Estimation, KSOFM, Optimal Parameters, Stator current, Torque, Unsupervised learning, Weight matrix.

Yougank Bhardwaj, UG Scholar,

Electrical and Electronics Engineering, SRM University, Chennai, India. yougank.bhardwaj@gmail.com Vijay Sridhar, UG Scholar, Electrical and Electronics Engineering, SRM University, Chennai, India. sputnik3389@gmail.com AC motor does, as well as advantages of high efficieny, no excitation cost and functional speed regulation as traditional DC motor does. So it is widely used in various fields of industrial control now. BLDC motors are found in computer peripherals, surgical devices, portable pumps, robotics, haptics[1]-[3], and electric cars etc., One strength of these new BLDC motors is that they have high torque and can be purchased in a very compact size (for example, the Maxon EC series and Portescap NuvoDisk series). As a result they have been included in many robotics and compact industrial designs [4], [5] or most hard drives, optical drives, cooling fans, and more. The stator is usually made from magnetic steel sheets. The stator phase windings are inserted in the slots (distributed winding) as shown in Fig. 1 or it can be wound as one coil on the magnetic pole. The magnetization of the permanent magnets and their displacement on the rotor is chosen so that the BackEMF (the voltage induced into the stator winding due to rotor movement) shape is trapezoidal. This allows the DC voltage with a rectangular shape to be used to create a rotational field with low torque ripples.

I.

INTRODUCTION

BLDC motors are one of the upcoming motors because of numerous advantages they possess. As BLDC has substituted the mechanical commutator with the electronics one, it eliminates the disadvantages of noise, spark, electromagnetic disturbance, short lifetime, etc. BLDC is also provided with advantages of simple structure, dependable operation and easy maintenance as

Figure 1

Cross section of a BLDC motor

978-1-4244-9477-4/11/$26.00 2011 IEEE

069

A current feedback error based single parameter estimation scheme for voltage controlled BLDC motors was proposed in [6]. However, when there exist errors in more than one parameter, performance of the single parameter estimation schemes will deteriorate, and the accuracy of the control system will also suffer. A parameter estimation technique for a BLDC motor driven by a PWM inverter, where several parameters can be estimated by measuring the motors input and output signals is also proposed [2]. Addressing this problem, a novel accurate speed estimation approach using the recently developed mathematical tool the Wavelet Neural Networks (WNNs) [7] has also been proposed. Unlike all these, this paper proposes a method of estimation of the characteristic parameters of a BLDCM even without requiring the actual machine, by Kohonens Self Organizing method. II. KOHONENS SELF ORGANIZING FEATURE MAP (KSOFM)

obtained with the hall voltages of the BLDCM by using the calculations available.

Figure 3

Block Diagram of the drive with KSOFM estimator

Fig. 2 shows the network architecture of a KSOFM. The input layer accepts multidimensional input pattern from the environment. An input pattern is represented by a vector. Each neurode in the input layer represents one dimension of the input pattern. An input neurode distributes its assigned element of the input vector to the competitive layer. The competitive layer consists of neurode each of which receives a sum of weighted inputs from the input layer. Every neurode in the competitive layer is associated with a collection of other neurodes which make up its 'neighbourhood. A competitive layer can be organized in 1 dimension, 2 dimensions, in general in n dimensions. The typical implementations are 1 or 2 dimensions. Upon the receipt of a given input, some of the neurodes will be sufficiently excited to fire.

The machine is run with the supply fed to it and the parameters such as stator current, Back EMF, speed and torque are observed through the various scopes of the Matlab software. These are used as data for training the KSOFM network .The various parameters are then estimated by the neural network. The simulink circuit and the various waveforms obtained through simulation and the various values estimated via the KSOFM network are discussed in the following sections. IV. SIMULINK CIRCUIT

The simulink circuit used for the simulation of BLDC motor for obtaining the various characteristics parameters is shown below.

Figure 4

Simulink Circuit of the BLDC motor drive

Figure 2

Network Architecture of KSOFM

The dc source with a capacitor in parallel forms a VSI, which feeds a universal bridge. The hall voltages obtained from the BLDCM are made use in obtaining the gating signals for the universal bridge. This VSI then feeds a BLDC motor and the characteristic parameters of the same are observed through various scopes connected as shown. V. WAVEFORMS AND OBSERVATIONS

The "output" of the network is the way it is chosen to view the interconnections between nodes in the competitive layer. If the nodes are arranged along a single dimension, output can be seen as a continuum. III. BLOCK DIAGRAM

The various waveforms obtained with the above simulink circuit are shown below and discussed as follows:

The block diagram for the estimation of BLDC motor parameters is shown in fig.3. The DC supply is fed as input to voltage source inverter which converts dc to ac and this is fed as input to the BLDC motor. The gating signals to the inverter are

Figure 5

Angular Speed(rad/sec) waveform of BLDCM

070

The angular speed of the BLDCM is shown in figure 5. The speed initially rises to a higher value and then settles down to steady state value after some time.

Figure 10 Input distribution Vs time of the Electromagnetic Torque Figure 6 Electromagnetic Torque (N-m) of BLDCM

The electromagnetic torque(N-m) of the BLDCM is shown in figure 6. Like speed the torque also rises to a higher value initially ,i.e., it encounters transients and then settles down to a steady value. The value of the torque is 11.5N-m. VI. OBSERVATIONS THROUGH KSOFM
Figure 11 Initial weight matrix Vs time for Electromagnetic Torque at Epoch=0

MATLAB coding is written for the KSOFM to estimate the BLDC motor parameters.The total number of input neurons in the network is taken as 2 and the number of output neurons as 6. The input data is obtained by simulating the simulink circuit as shown in fig. 3. The input distribution, initial weight matrix at epoch=0 and the final weight matrix at epoch=500 are obtained and presented in this section and inferences are made at the end.

Figure 12 Final weight matrix Vs time pertaining to Electromagnetic Torque at Epoch=500

Figure 7 Input distribution Vs time for the angular speed

The net input distribution of the rotor angular speed and the Electromagnetic torque are plotted versus time and are shown in figs. 7 and 10 respectively. In fact the input values are obtained from the simulation, which are used here for the plot. Figures 8 and 11 show the initial weight matrix map Vs time at epoch=0 for the rotor angular speed and the Electromagnetic torque. The weight matrix values are assigned randomly by the program itself and are plotted. The program is made to run for 500 epochs and at epoch=500, the obtained final weight matrices for the rotor angular speed and the Electromagnetic torque are plotted versus time and are shown in figs 9 and 12. It can be observed that the values of the weight matrix are converged at the end of the epoch.

Figure 8 Initial weight matrix Vs time for angular speed at epoch=0

Table 1 Figure 9 Final weight matrix Vs time pertaining for angular speed at Epoch=500

Final weight matrix, winner neuron and the magnitude of the rotor angular speed (rad/sec)

In table 1 the numerical values of the final matrix at epoch=500, the winner neuron and the output value of

071

the rotor angular speed (rad/sec) are shown. The winner neuron is 5 and the value of rotor angular speed, r as obtained by KSOFM is 258 rad/sec.

Table 2 Final weight matrix, winner neuron and the magnitude of the Electromagnetic torque (N-m)

Table 2 shows the final weight matrix, the winner neuron and the magnitude of the electromagnetic torque at epoch 500. The winner neuron is 3 and the torque magnitude is 12N-m. Values Rotor Angular Speed(rad/sec) Electromagnetic Torque(N-m)
Table 3

Simulation 256 11.5 (12 approx.)

KSOFM 258 12

necessary for the estimation of the performance characteristics parameters such as back EMF, stator current, rotor speed, Torque etc., Many ideas have been proposed for the estimation of these characteristic parameters. This paper proposes an unsupervised learning method of Artificial Neural Network i.e., Kohonens Self Organizing Feature Map method of estimation of BLDCM drives. Simulation of the drive was first performed under ideal conditions and the values of the above mentioned parameters were obtained which were used as data set to the KSOFM network. Also in simulation the conditions assumed were ideal. And because the Kohonens method makes use of winner takes it all of neurons, the values obtained by this with the simulation datas, used for its training, are obviously the optimal values. Matlab/Simulink was used for simulating the BLDCM drive and Matlab coding was written for KSOFM which was run and various maps of KSOFM were obtained. The waveforms and the maps were shown and inferences were made. The values obtained using these two methods were compared and were found to match with each other. REFERENCES
[1] T. Massie. Design of a three degree of freedom force-reflecting haptic interface. Masters thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 1996. Moseler, O., Isermann, R., Application of Model-Based Fault Detection to a Brushless DC Motor, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, Vol. 47, No. 5, pp.1015-1020 Oct. 2000. J. M. Vandeweghe, M. Rogers, M. Weissert, and Y. Matsuoka. The act hand: Design of the skeletal structure. Proc. 2004 IEEE Int. Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 04), May 2004. Simpkins. Exploratory studies of human sensor motor learning with system identification and stochastic optimal control. PhD thesis, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, CA, 2009. D. Wilkinson, J. M. Vandeweghe, and Y. Matsuoka. An extensor mechanism for an anatomical robotic hand. Proc. 2003 IEEE Int. Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 03), 1:238 243, May 2003. Klienau, J., Patankar, R. P., Collier, S., Chandy, A., Feedback parameter estimation for electric machines, US app #. 10/013932, Pub. # US 2003/0071594 A1, 2003. Q.Zhang and A. Benviste, Wavelet Networks, IEEE Trans. Neural Networks, Vol.3, no. 6, pp. 889-898, Nov.1992.

Comparison of the values obtained through simulation and KSOFM

Table 3 compares the various values of the characteristic parameters of the BLDCM obtained with simulation and Kohonens method. It can be observed that the values are much closer to each other. Also in simulation the conditions assumed are ideal and along with this since the competition between the output neurons results in only one neuron to be the winner, it can be concluded that the obtained parameters are the optimal values. CONCLUSION Model Aircraft including helicopters, Consumer electronics such as computer hard drives and CD/DVD players, electric vehicles, electric bicycles, hybrid vehicles all make use of BLDC motors. These motors also possess many advatages when compared with induction motors such as higher efficiencies, High torque to inertia ratios, Greater speed capabilities, Lower audible noise, Better thermal efficiencies, Lower EMI characteristics, electronically commutated etc., In the design of such advantageous motors it becomes

[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]

[6]

[7]