Performance Analysis of Brushless DC Motor Drive for Air Conditioner

This paper presents an efficiency comparison and verification of two types of Brushless DC (BLDC) motors and drives combination. The trapezoidal BLDC motor is excited by trapezoidal drive and sinusoidal BLDC motor is excited by sinusoidal drive. In air conditioner fan motor system, the sinusoidal type of BLDC motor with sinusoidal drive is applied. However, the DC link voltage of the motor is high and thus demands for high power consumption. Furthermore, the sinusoidal drive use vector control which is complicated to be implemented and make the driver high cost. Therefore, further improvement in energy consumption and drive system is required by develop combination of trapezoidal BLDC motor with trapezoidal drive. Thus, these two combination motors and drives required for efficiency comparison. The motors drives are simulated by using MATLAB and then their efficiencies are measured. At the end of this paper, the results show that the trapezoidal BLDC motor with trapezoidal drive offers higher efficiency compared to sinusoidal BLDC motor with vector control drive. It indicates that the developed drive system is considerable to be applied in the air conditioner fan motor system.