Improved performance of a sensorless DC motor control using fuzzy logic

Despite of the development of various types of electric motors, DC motors are still used in many industrial applications as this type of motors can easily be controlled and it has the wide range to be adjusted. Moreover, the DC motor drive systems are usually an object for deploying the novel control algorithms. This paper presents a speed-sensorless control system for a separately-excited DC motor. In particular, an adaptive observer is developed to estimate the actual speed of the motor. In addition, instead of using a traditional linear PI controller like previous researches, a Fuzzy Logic Controller (FLC) has been proposed to significantly improve the performance of the motor. The simulation results using Matlab/Simulink software show that the FLC-based speed control system outperforms the linear PI-based speed control system in terms of the technical criteria: significantly reducing the overshoot and shortening the settling time of the speed response of the motor.