A Study on the Torque Ripple Reduction in Brushless DC Motors using Disturbance-Observer Controller

Abstract

In this paper, we study the problem of torque ripple minimization in Brushless DC Motors (BLDC) and proposes a disturbance observer (DOB) based controller in order to efficiently reduce the torque ripple. In the DOB based control system, an equivalent disturbance (plant disturbance and effect of modelling error) is cancelled by its estimate. When the DOB controller is applied to BLDC motors, the effect of inverter switching is considered as an equivalent disturbance and to be cancelled by the DOB controller. Through computer simulations, it is shown that the performance of the proposed DOB controller is superior to that of the conventional PI controller. In the case where the numerical values of resistance and inductance are not known exactly, it is shown that the proposed DOB controller achieves better performance than the PI controller.