A Novel Fuzzy-PSO Controller for Increasing the Lifetime in Power Electronics Stage for Brushless DC Drives

Abstract

In electric drives, the lifetime of the power electronics stage is strongly reduced by the command signals from the speed controller because the features of the power electronics stage are not included in the controller design. A reduction in the power electronics lifetime generates premature fault conditions during the operation of electric drives, which directly affects the industrial processes where the power electronic stage is used. Thus, power electronics stages for controllers are frequently overdesigned, which reduces their efficiency and increments their weight, size, and cost. Power electronics stages are generally designed using essential electronic devices, such as insulated gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs) or metal–oxide–semiconductor field effect transistors (MOSFETs) that have limited lifetimes. In electric drives, these power electronics components work under high switching frequencies to drive high electric power to achieve the desired mechanical references, such as speed and position in electric brushless dc motors. In this paper, we propose power electronics lifetime optimization and a faster speed response in a brushless dc motor drive by a fuzzy particle swarm optimization (Fuzzy-PSO) controller, which is a fuzzy logic controller (FLC) modified by PSO. Moreover, an objective function which includes the desired speed and the reference temperature is proposed. The proposed controller is compared with a conventional proportional–integral–derivative (PID) controller and FLC via co-simulation in Multisim and LabVIEW software. The results confirm that the Fuzzy-PSO has a superior speed performance and improves the lifetime in the power electronics stages. This proposal is an important contribution to industrial electric drives that require incrementing the power electronics lifetime.