OPTIMIZED SPEED CONTROL OF BLDC MOTORS USING WHALE OPTIMIZATION ALGORITHM-BASED PID CONTROLLER

Abstract

Brushless Direct Current (BLDC) motors are increasingly being used in today's applications for various industrial use cases because of their high efficiency, compact size, low maintenance, excellent torque feature, and superior speed control characteristics. They find widespread application across various fields, including electric vehicles, robotics, aerospace systems, industrial automation, and precision manufacturing. The nonlinear system behavior, parameter variations, load disturbances and changes in operating conditions are however key challenges with regard to accurate and stable speed control of BLDC motors. The conventional proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controllers widely used for speed control have a simple structure and are easy to implement. However, their performance is very sensitive to the tuning of the controller parameters and conventional tuning techniques do not produce optimal performance for dynamic conditions. The current project suggests a PID controller tuned by EWOA for optimal speed control of BLDC motors. The method proposed here is a combination of the exploration and exploitation properties of the Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) which is used to adaptively adjust the PID controller gains automatically to obtain the best performance. The purpose of the optimization process is to reduce important performance indices like rise time, settling time, overshoot and steady state error and to improve the stability and robustness of the system. The BLDC (Braked Loaded DC) motor drive system has been modeled and simulated under different operating conditions and the performance of the proposed BLDC controller has been investigated by simulation studies. The results show that the EWOA-PID controller has faster dynamic response, better speed tracking accuracy, less oscillation and better disturbance rejection than the traditional PID tuning methods. Thus, the proposed controller is a novel and reliable controller for achieving high performance in BLDC motor drive applications in modern industrial and transportation system.