Low cost sensorless control of brushless DC motors with improved speed range

This paper presents a low-cost position sensorless control scheme for brushless DC motors. Rotor position information is extracted by indirectly sensing the back EMF from only one of the three motor-terminal voltages for a three-phase motor. Depending on the terminal voltage sensing locations, either a low-pass filter or a band-pass filter is used for position information retrieval. This leads to significant reduction in components count of the sensing circuit. Cost saving is further increased by coupling the sensing circuit with a single-chip microprocessor or digital signal processor for speed control. In addition, a look-up table correction for the non-ideal phase-delay introduced by the filter is suggested to ensure accurate position detection even at low speed. This extends the operating speed range and improves motor efficiency. Experimental results are included to verify the proposed scheme.