Sensorless brushless DC motor drive design and performance comparison of different control methods

Brushless direct current motors (BLDCMs) have been preferred in many application areas such as household appliances, robotics, and electric vehicles for having high efficiency, high torque-to-weight ratio, demanding less maintenance and so on. Electronic driver and control card are needed to operate these motors. In this study, a low-cost drive circuit is designed for BLDCMs with L298N H-bridge inverter structure and Atmel microcontroller and a sensorless control algorithm is proposed. In addition, 120°, 150°, and 180° commutation, direct digital synthesis (DDS) based sinusoidal control, and back-EMF-based control methods are applied in simulation and experimental studies. The performance benchmarking of the methods is realized in terms of values of current drawn from the power supply, revolution per minute, and thrust. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated by comparing it with a method having remarkable results within other applied control methods. According to the acquired data, better results are achieved with the proposed method than the compared method.