Sliding Mode Control of Brushless DC Motor Speed Control

Over the years, development in control industry has brought a conventional controller, Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controller as Brushless DC (BLDC) motor speed regulator. The PID controller suffers from lengthy design time due to the large number of rules and parameter tuning. Thus, this paper proposes a newly developed Sliding Mode Controller (SMC) to be used as the BLDC motor speed controller. SMC is a modern speed controller which is also a non-linear speed controller where it can show high performance controlling non-linear plant like BLDC motor. SMC gives a speed performance comparable to the PID but with much robust speed performance in terms of small overshoot and short settling time. The motor performance with SMC is evaluated through simulation and experimental approach in terms of speed response under several test conditions. The performance is then compared with the motor performance with PID speed controller. Overall, SMC is outperformed PID controller in terms of speed performance with no overshoot and less settling time.