An examination of the impact of the selected error criterion on the ACO performance in BLDC drives

Abstract

Brushless direct current (BLDC) motor drives are becoming increasingly popular in motion control applications. As a result, a low-cost but effective BLDC motor speed controller is required. They are used in industrial and home appliances with conventional motor drive technology, such as robots, refrigerators and air conditioning systems. Brushless direct current (BLDC) drives are well known for their high efficiency and low maintenance. This work aims to design a non-conventional PID controller via Ant Colony Optimisers (ACO) in order to obtain an efficient speed performance for a BLDC motor "namely, Maxon EC flat". Moreover, when ACO is used for tuning of PID control, the objective function is required. Therefore, in this work, four different objective functions which are MSE, ISE, IAE, and ITAE are applied and their performance was compared in terms of motor' speed stability. In a simulation environment, the PID controller is used to control the speed of BLDC motors under three testing conditions which are Small, medium, and high inertia loads. The simulation results demonstrate that MSE offers the best performance under low and high inertial loading cases. Whereas, IAE has been superior compared with other criterions when medium loads are applied. Moreover, this paper shows a stability speed- power consumption trade-off problem. In other words, achieving a fast stability via any type of error indices doesn’t guarantee a low amount of consuming energy.