A Direct Redundancy Approach to Fault-Tolerant Control of BLDC Motor With a Damaged Hall-Effect Sensor

Often for a closed-loop operation of a brushless direct current (BLDC) motor, Hall-effect sensors are used and recently there have been a number of discussions on Fault-Tolerant Control (FTC) of the BLDC motor for a defective Hall-effect sensor. However, so far, direct redundancy based approach for FTC of BLDC motor for a position sensor fault is not presented. This paper contributes a direct redundancy based method by utilizing redundant Hall-effect sensors for FTC of a BLDC motor. Redundant Hall-effect sensors generate additional transitions resulting in faster fault detection. To verify the proposed idea, MATLAB/Simulink model is developed, and the simulation results are presented by programing a MATLAB function block acting as a fault-tolerant controller. Furthermore, the algorithm is implemented into the MicroLabBox for experimental validation, and the results are discussed.