Design and Control of Brushless DC Motor Drives for Refrigerated Cabinets

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to develop a variable frequency brushless DC motor drive for the compressors of refrigerated cabinets. It is based on the microcontroller unit (MCU) produced by Renesas Co., Ltd. using the space vector pulse width modulation (SVPWM) for the modulation of the inverter. In addition, at the AC power supply side of the inverter developed, a circuit for suppressing electromagnetic interference (EMI) and a power factor corrector (PFC) are integrated to control the power factor (PF) at the AC power supply side to be above 0.95, which is far better than the commercially available inverters with a power factor of only 0.5. Finally, an intelligent variable frequency control approach based on the extension theory is designed to classify the rotational speed difference and the rate of change in rotational speed difference between the rotational speed commands and the actual rotational speed of the compressor into 20 zones. Then, for the rotational speed difference and the rate of change in rotational speed difference actually measured, their correlations to the 20 zone categories are calculated to determine an appropriate rotational speed command. The temperature of the refrigerated cabinets can quickly be determined to reach the set target value. The proposed extension speed control is simple in computation and does not require much learning data, making it easy to implement. Furthermore, the drive developed is verified by actual testing and its performance is compared to the compressor drives of the refrigerated cabinets commercially available. It is proved that the performance of the drives developed is indeed far better than that of the drives commercially available.

Keywords

• refrigerated cabinet
• brushless DC motor drive
• microcontroller
• voltage space vector modulation
• electromagnetic interference suppression
• power factor corrector