Title: Novel digital control of conventional electric motor drives for home appliances

Authors: Srdjan Lukic, Abhijeet Bhandwale, Ali Emadi

Addresses: Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, North Carolina State University, Campus Box 7571, Raleigh, NC 27606, USA. ' Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Illinois Institute of Technology, 3301 South Dearborn Street, Suite 103, Siegel Hall, Chicago, IL 60616, USA. ' Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Illinois Institute of Technology, 3301 South Dearborn Street, Suite 103, Siegel Hall, Chicago, IL 60616, USA

Abstract: Research has been done on developing advanced control strategies for industrial DC motor drives. However, there is little advancement in the controllers designed for small appliance motors, which still use old and inefficient methods of control. The old methods of appliance motor control are the triac control and the PWM control. These methods are cheap and easy to implement, but they have a drawback – not regulating the controlled quantity properly and fast enough. The only reason they still persist in the appliance market is because of their cost of implementation. Appliance markets are very sensitive to cost changes; therefore, everything for an appliance motor is optimised for low cost. In this paper, we present a new control strategy for appliance motors, which is inherently digital in nature. |The pulse adjustment method| can be used to control the speed of appliance motors very effectively. The implementation is easy and the cost of implementation is also low; yet, this method gives better results as compared to the PWM and triac control. The said performance of the pulse adjustment method is proven through simulations.

Keywords: motor drives; power electronics; digital control; universal motor; home appliances; small appliances; appliance motor control; pulse adjustment; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPELEC.2010.029495

International Journal of Power Electronics, 2010 Vol.2 No.1, pp.16 - 35

Received: 02 Sep 2008
Accepted: 24 Feb 2009
Published online: 30 Nov 2009 *

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