Hall Sensor Output Signal Fault-Detection & Safety Implementation Logic

¹ Intelligent automotive team, Daegu Mechatronics & Materials Institute, S.Korea
² 2STARGROUPIND. LTD, S.Korea

Abstract

Recently BLDC motors have been popular in various industrial applications and electric mobility. Recently BLDC motors have been popular in various industrial applications and electric mobility. In most brushless direct current (BLDC) motor drives, there are three hall sensors as a position reference. Low resolution hall effect sensor is popularly used to estimate the rotor position because of its good comprehensive performance such as low cost, high reliability and sufficient precision. Various possible faults may happen in a hall effect sensor. This paper presents a fault-tolerant operation method that allows the control of a BLDC motor with one faulty hall sensor and presents the hall sensor output fault-tolerant control strategy. The situations considered are when the output from a hall sensor stays continuously at low or high levels, or a short-time pulse appears on a hall sensor signal. For fault detection, identification of a faulty signal and generating a substitute signal, this method only needs the information from the hall sensors. There are a few research work on hall effect sensor failure of BLDC motor. The conventional fault diagnosis methods are signal analysis, model based analysis and knowledge based analysis. The proposed method is signal based analysis using a compensation signal for reconfiguration and therefore fault diagnosis can be fast. The proposed method is validated to execute the simulation using PSIM.