Enhancement of Power Quality and Speed Regulation of a BLDC Motor Drive using Water Cycle Algorithm

Abstract

Permanent magnet Brushless DC motors are used in several applications because of its advantages such as high reliability, high power output, constant torque, low maintenance cost, good heat dissipation and better efficiency. Also, rapidly decreasing cost of permanent magnets is an added advantage. Hence, BLDC motors are suitable for many variable-speed drive applications. Various DC-DC converters are used for driving the BLDC motor and Interleaved Boost converter is one of them. BLDC motor drive is fed through a diode bridge rectifier which lowers the power factor. Hence, power factor correction converters are necessary in such applications. In the present work, to improve the power quality of the AC mains and hence the power factor, Interleaved boost converter controlled by PI controller is used. The gains of the PI controller are decided by Water cycle algorithm (WCA) using Integral Time Absolute Error (ITAE) criterion. Speed control of the BLDC motor is done by controlling the output voltage of the converter which acts as a DC link voltage to the Three Phase Voltage Source Inverter (VSI). MATLAB SIMULINK software is used for the design and performance analysis of the BLDC.