Torque Ripple Reduction for BLDC Permanent Magnet Motor Drive Using DC-Link Voltage and Current Modulation

This paper proposes a torque ripple reduction for brushless DC (BLDC) permanent magnetic (PM) motor drive based on the DC-link voltage pulse amplitude modulation (PAM). The proposed method improves torque ripple drawback for BLDC drives at low speed. BLDC drives have the better inverter efficiency and requires low position sensing resolution. However, both freewheeling current during diode conduction and discontinuous motor phase current cause high torque ripples. In this paper, a front-end DC converter is added to improve BLDC torque ripples. Although the integration of DC converter and BLDC drive has been reported, the DC voltage regulation for the BLDC torque ripple compensation is this paper novelty. On the basis, the DC bus is modulated during diode conduction to manipulate the DC current dynamically every BLDC commutation period. In addition considering the discontinuous six-step commutation, the DC current is also regulated with the 6th-order spatial harmonic to minimize the commutation reflected torque ripple. The proposed torque ripple compensation of BLDC drive is verified by simulation for different PM motor types.

Keywords: Torque ripple, brushless DC motor, and pulse amplitude modulation.