Modeling and control of a permanent-magnet brushless DC motor drive using a fractional order proportional-integral-derivative controller

This paper deals with the speed control of a permanent-magnet brushless direct current (PMBLDC) motor. A fractional order PID (FOPID) controller is used in place of the conventional PID controller. The FOPID controller is a generalized form of the PID controller in which the order of integration and differentiation is any real number. It is shown that the proposed controller provides a powerful framework to control the PMBLDC motor. Parameters of the controller are found by using a novel dynamic particle swarm optimization (dPSO) method. The frequency domain pole-zero (p-z) interlacing method is used to approximate the fractional order operator. A three-phase inverter with four switches is used in place of the conventional six-switches inverter to suggest a cost-effective control scheme. The digital controller has been implemented using a field programmable gate array (FPGA). The control scheme is verified using the FPGA-in-the-loop (FIL) wizard of MATLAB/Simulink. Improvement in the overall performance of the system is observed using the proposed FOPID controller. The energy efficient nature of the FOPID controller is also demonstrated.