Method and device for controlling electric motors of the brushless direct-current type, particularly for moving the weft winding arm in weft feeders for weaving looms

[0002] The present invention relates to a method and a device for controlling brushless direct-current electric motors, commonly known by the acronym BLDC, which allow the advantageous application of said motors to the movement of the weft winding arm in weft feeders for weaving looms.

[0003] It is known that weft feeders are devices which comprise a fixed drum on which a weft winding arm winds, as in a fishing reel, a plurality of turns of thread which constitutes a weft reserve. Said turns unwind from the drum of the feeder, when requested by the loom, at each weft insertion, and the weft winding arm, under the control of a supervisor microprocessor, winds new turns in order to restore the weft reserve.

[0004] The motor that is currently most widely used for moving the weft winding arm is the three-phase asynchronous type. This choice is essentially dictated by the inherent characteristics of these motors and mainly by their low installation and maintenance costs, afforded by their simple and sturdy structure and by their complete lack of elements in mutual sliding contact.

[0005] Moreover, the evolution of semiconductor technology has made available control microprocessors which integrate peripherals capable of directly generating the waveforms of the control signals for the inverter that actuates said motors, where the term “inverter” designates the driving device capable of generating a system of multiple-phase sinusoidal voltages whose amplitude and frequency can be varied at will.

[0006] However, although said three-phase asynchronous motors yield satisfactory efficiency in terms of performance/cost ratio, they have some drawbacks which limit said performance, especially when applied to the movement of said weft winding arm of weft feeders.

[0007] The greatest of these drawbacks is that it is impossible to achieve effective and simple control of the torque delivered by the motor. For this purpose it is in fact necessary to resort to sophisticated control systems of the vector type, which however, due to the large number of sensors required (at least two for phase current control and one for detecting the rotation rate) and to the high computing power requirement, are not adapted for low-cost installation on said weft feeders. Accordingly, such expensive and complicated control systems of the vector type are avoided, by typically assuming, for motor speed adjustment, an open-loop system, leaving the synchronization speed set by the inverter to be chased by said motor.

[0008] In this manner, however, it is not possible to obtain high-level dynamic performance from the motor, and this is a severe drawback if the weft winding arm of said feeder is required to provide high accelerations and decelerations, as increasingly often occurs due to the continuous increase in weaving speed.

[0009] Moreover, with the open-loop adjustment system the current absorbed by the motor is often significantly higher than actually required, and therefore the excess absorbed power is dissipated as heat, causing dangerous overheating of the motor and of the electronic components of the power section of the inverter.

[0010] The aim of the present invention is to eliminate these severe drawbacks by replacing, for the movement of the weft winding arm in said weft feeders, the three-phase asynchronous motor with a motor of the above specified brushless direct-current type and by providing a method and a device for controlling said brushless motor which are particularly adapted to meet the operating requirements of modem weft feeders.

[0011] The advantages provided by the use of a brushless motor instead of the three-phase asynchronous motor substantially consist in the possibility to directly and easily control the torque by way of the corresponding control of the current that circulates in the switched stator phases; in the improved power/volume ratio, with a consequent and corresponding reduction, for an equal delivered power, in the dimensions of the motor and, as a whole, of the feeder; in the reduced inertia of the rotor, allowing better accelerations; and in the simplification of the stator windings by means of the adoption of diametrical turns.

[0012] However, conventional devices currently used for driving a brushless motor typically have a supervisor microprocessor, an angular velocity sensor and a set of three position sensors designed to encode the angular position of the rotor in steps of 60 electrical degrees. This information is in fact essential in order to allow the supervisor microprocessor to switch the correct stator phases, i.e., the phase currents that generate a stator flux in quadrature with the rotor flux generated by the permanent magnets.

[0013] The presence of said angular velocity and position sensors, however, significantly complicates the structure of the driving device and offsets most of the above-listed advantages which are typical of brushless motors, on the one hand by significantly increasing the installation costs of said motors and their overall dimensions and on the other hand by equally significantly reducing the reliability of the motor/control system.

[0014] The aim of the present invention is to provide a method and a device for controlling brushless motors which, by eliminating the drawbacks of conventional control systems, make it advantageous to apply said motors to the movement of the weft winding arm, maintaining its inherent characteristics, which are particularly favorable for this application, with all the consequent advantages.

[0015] Within the scope of this aim, an object of the present invention is to provide an adjustment method and device which are simple, inexpensive and highly efficient and reliable.

[0016] According to the present invention, these and other objects which will become better apparent hereinafter are achieved with a method and a device for controlling electric motors of the brushless type which have the specific characteristics stated in the appended claims.

[0017] Substantially, the invention is based on the concept of eliminating, in the control system, the angular velocity sensor and the set of three sensors that encode the angular position of the rotor, and of determining said velocity and position by deducing them from the sampled reading of the phase voltages of the motor, providing the supervisor microprocessor with corresponding information useful for stator phase switching. Moreover, according to the invention, the current of each phase is measured by means of a shunt resistor which is inserted on the negative conductor of the three-phase power supply bridge, since only one current at a time circulates in brushless motors.

[0018] Further characteristics and advantages of the control method and device according to the invention will become better apparent from the detailed description that follows and with reference to the accompanying drawings, provided by way of non-limitative example, wherein:

[0019] FIGS. 1a, 1b, 1cform, as a whole, the electrical diagram of the control device according to the invention;

[0020] FIG. 2 is a diagram of the control microprocessor that drives the device of FIGS. 1a-cwith the corresponding peripherals integrated therein;

[0021] FIG. 3 is an electrical diagram of the stator windings of the motor controlled by the control device of FIGS. 1;

[0022] FIG. 4 is a chart which plots the counterelectromotive forces generated in the stator windings of FIG. 3.

[0023] In FIG. 1, PO generally designates the star bridge of a driving inverter of a per se known type, which generates a set of three phase voltages Va−Vb−Vc, which in the illustrated example are applied to a brushless motor BLDC.

[0024] In a per se known manner, the bridge PO is constituted by six power transistors Q1 . . . Q6 of the MOSFET or IGBT type, each provided with a control electrode (gate) to which a respective switching signal G1 . . . G6 is applied, and each having an integrated recirculation diode arranged in parallel to the transistor. The DC voltage V is fed to said bridge and is applied between a positive conductor Cp and a negative conductor Cn connected to the ground.

[0025] According to the present invention, each one of the phase voltages Va−Vb−Vc is detected by a corresponding detection circuit CL, shown in FIG. 1b, and is sent by said circuit to the corresponding channel Ch of an analog-digital converter A/D, which constitutes an integrated peripheral of a supervisor microprocessor MC, in order to provide said microprocessor with a signal which is useful for switching the stator phases, as explained in detail hereinafter.

[0026] Each circuit CL comprises a divider R1-R2 which attenuates the respective phase voltage (Va in the illustrated example) to a value which is compatible with the input of the converter A/D, followed by an amplifier Al designed to decouple said resistors R1-R2 from the signal sent directly on said corresponding channel of the converter A/D.

[0027] According to another characteristic of the invention, the current switched in the various phases is detected, in order to provide a corresponding useful signal to the microprocessor MC, by converting into a voltage Vs, by means of a shunt resistor RS, the current that circulates on the negative conductor Cn for supplying the bridge PO. In order to limit the dissipation on the shunt resistor RS, the voltage Vs is necessarily chosen low, so that it is conveniently processed in a corresponding detection circuit LS, shown in FIG. 1c, which is formed by a network which comprises an amplifier A2 which is fedback by the voltage of a resistive divider R4-R5; said network introduces an amplification factor equal to 1+R4/R5. The output of the amplifier A2 is filtered in the low-pass filter R3-C1, which eliminates the high-frequency noise that is present in the signal Vs (generated by the fast switching of the power transistors Q) and the filtered signal is sent to a corresponding channel Ch of the converter A/D, which is also an integrated peripheral of the microprocessor MC. Accordingly, the peripheral A/D has at least three channels Ch1-2-3 dedicated to reading the phase voltages and an additional channel Ch4 dedicated to reading the phase current expressed in terms of corresponding voltage Vs.

[0028] An additional peripheral WFG (Wave Form Generator), further integrated in the microprocessor MC, generates logic signals GL1-GL6, and a subsequent circuit block GD (Gate Driver) converts said signals into the real signals for controlling the electrodes G1-G6 of the power transistors Q1-Q6.

[0029] The sensorless switching method according to the present invention is now described with reference to FIGS. 3 and 4.

[0030] It is known that in a BLDC motor the counterelectromotive forces Ea−Eb−Ec induced in the corresponding windings by the phase currents (FIG. 3) have, as the electric angle ae varies, the trapezoidal behavior shown in the chart of FIG. 4. Said chart also plots the currents Ia-Ib-Ic that circulate in the respective phases A-B-C. The chart shows that the generic counterelectromotive force Ex crosses zero 30 electrical degrees before and after the switching of the corresponding current Ix that circulates in the winding being considered.

[0031] The method according to the invention consists in taking the zero crossing of the counterelectromotive force Ex as the time reference for determining the switching time of the corresponding current Ix. Moreover, the microprocessor deduces the zero crossing of the generic counterelectromotive force Ex from the value of the respective phase voltage Vx at the same instant.

[0032] With reference to the notations of FIG. 4, where I designates the current, R and L designate the resistance and the inductance of each phase, and Vn designates the center-star voltage of the bridge PO relative to the ground, the following equations in fact hold:

[0033] Va=Ea+Vn  1)

[0034] Vb=Eb+RI+L dI/dt+Vn  2)

[0035] Vc=Ec−RI−L dI/dt−Vn  3)

[0036] At the instant in which Ea=0, one has:

[0037] Va=Vn and Eb=−Ec  4)

[0038] Vb+Vc=2Vn=2Va  5)

[0039] $\mathrm{Va}=\frac{\mathrm{Vb}+\mathrm{Vc}}{2}$

[0040] and more generally $6)\mathrm{Vx}=\frac{\mathrm{Vy}+\mathrm{Vz}}{2}$

[0041] This means that the counterelectromotive force of the unpowered phase, which is the phase A in the example, crosses zero when the voltage Va of that phase is equal to the arithmetic mean of the other two phase voltages.

[0042] Accordingly, according to the invention, the microprocessor MC is programmed to sample, at a sufficiently high rate, the phase voltages Va−Vb−Vc, and by detecting, for each phase, the corresponding value of the voltage for which the respective counterelectromotive force becomes zero, it calculates, starting from the instant when said value is detected, the time Tc at the end of which the bridge PO of the driving inverter must switch to the subsequent state.

[0043] Correspondingly, since the zero crossings of the three counterelectromotive phases are equally spaced at 60°-electrical and at 60°p-mechanical (where p is the number of poles of the BLDC motor), the microprocessor MC, by measuring the time interval between two (or more) consecutive zero crossings, also deduces the angular velocity at the rotor.

[0044] Without altering the concept of the invention, the details of execution of the control method and the embodiments of the device for performing the method can be varied extensively, with respect to what has been described and illustrated by way of non-limitative example, without thereby abandoning the scope of the invention.

[0045] The disclosures in Italian Patent Application No. TO99A000399 from which this application claims priority are incorporated herein by reference.