Compensation of torque ripple in high performance BLDC motor drives

Brushless DC motor drives (BLDC) are finding expanded use in high performance applications where torque smoothness is essential. The nature of the square-wave current excitation waveforms in BLDC motor drives permits some important system simplifications compared to sinusoidal permanent magnet AC (PMAC) machines. However, it is the simplicity of the BLDC motor drive that is responsible for causing an additional source of ripple torque commonly known as commutation torque to develop. In this paper, a compensation technique for reducing the commutation torque ripple is proposed. With the experimental results, the proposed method demonstrates the effectiveness for a control system using the BLDC motors that requires high speed and accuracy. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd.