Speed Controllers

V3.03 5-Oct-2005
1. Introduction
The purpose of a motor speed controller is to take a signal representing the demanded speed, and to
drive a motor at that speed. The controller may or may not actually measure the speed of the motor. If
it does, it is called a Feedback Speed Controller or Closed Loop Speed Controller, if not it is called an
Open Loop Speed Controller. Feedback speed control is better, but more complicated, and may not be
required for a simple robot design.
Motors come in a variety of forms, and the speed controller's motor drive output will be different
dependent on these forms. The speed controller presented here is designed to drive a simple
cheap starter motor from a car, which can be purchased from any scrap yard. These motors are
generally series wound, which means to reverse them, they must be altered slightly, (see the
section on motors).
Below is a simple block diagram of the speed controller. We'll go through the important parts
block by block in detail.

2. Theory of DC motor speed control
The speed of a DC motor is directly proportional to the supply voltage, so if we reduce the supply
voltage from 12 Volts to 6 Volts, the motor will run at half the speed. How can this be achieved when
the battery is fixed at 12 Volts?
The speed controller works by varying the average voltage sent to the motor. It could do this by
simply adjusting the voltage sent to the motor, but this is quite inefficient to do. A better way is
to switch the motor's supply on and off very quickly. If the switching is fast enough, the motor
doesn't notice it, it only notices the average effect.
When you watch a film in the cinema, or the television, what you are actually seeing is a series
of fixed pictures, which change rapidly enough that your eyes just see the average effect -
movement. Your brain fills in the gaps to give an average effect.
Now imagine a light bulb with a switch. When you close the switch, the bulb goes on and is at
full brightness, say 100 Watts. When you open the switch it goes off (0 Watts). Now if you close
the switch for a fraction of a second, then open it for the same amount of time, the filament won't
have time to cool down and heat up, and you will just get an average glow of 50 Watts. This is
how lamp dimmers work, and the same principle is used by speed controllers to drive a motor.
When the switch is closed, the motor sees 12 Volts, and when it is open it sees 0 Volts. If the
switch is open for the same amount of time as it is closed, the motor will see an average of 6
Volts, and will run more slowly accordingly.
As the amount of time that the voltage is on increases compared with the amount of time that it is
off, the average speed of the motor increases.
This on-off switching is performed by power MOSFETs. A MOSFET (Metal-Oxide-
Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor) is a device that can turn very large currents on and off
under the control of a low signal level voltage. For more detailed information, see the dedicated
chapter on MOSFETs)
The time that it takes a motor to speed up and slow down under switching conditions is
dependant on the inertia of the rotor (basically how heavy it is), and how much friction and load
torque there is. The graph below shows the speed of a motor that is being turned on and off fairly
slowly:

You can see that the average speed is around 150, although it varies quite a bit. If the supply
voltage is switched fast enough, it wont have time to change speed much, and the speed will be
quite steady. This is the principle of switch mode speed control. Thus the speed is set by PWM
Pulse Width Modulation.
2.1. Inductors
Before we go on to discuss the circuits, we must first learn something about the action of inductive
loads, and inductors. Inductors do not allow the current flowing through them to change instantly (in
the same way capacitors do not allow the voltage across them to change instantly). The voltage dropped
across an inductor carrying a current i is given by the equation

where di/dt is the rate of change of the current. If the current is suddenly changed by opening a
switch, or turning a transistor off, the inductor will generate a very high voltage across it. For
example, turning off 100 Amps in 1 microsecond through a 100 microHenry inductor generates
10kV!
2.2. PWM frequency
The frequency of the resulting PWM signal is dependant on the frequency of the ramp
waveform. What frequency do we want? This is not a simple question. Some pros and cons are:
Frequencies between 20Hz and 18kHz may produce audible screaming from the speed
controller and motors - this may be an added attraction for your robot!
RF interference emitted by the circuit will be worse the higher the switching frequency is.
Each switching on and off of the speed controller MOSFETs results in a little power loss.
Therefore the greater the time spent switching compared with the static on and off times, the
greater will be the resulting 'switching loss' in the MOSFETs.
The higher the switching frequency, the more stable is the current waveform in the motors. This
waveform will be a spiky switching waveform at low frequencies, but at high frequencies the
inductance of the motor will smooth this out to an average DC current level proportional to the
PWM demand. This spikyness will cause greater power loss in the resistances of the wires,
MOSFETs, and motor windings than a steady DC current waveform.
This third point can be seen from the following two graphs. One shows the worst case on-off
current waveform, the other the best case steady DC current waveform:

Both waveforms have the same average current. However, when we work out the power
dissipation in the stray resistances in our motor and speed controller, for the DC case:

and for the switching case, the average power is

So in the switching waveform, twice as much power is lost in the stray resistances. In practice
the current waveform will not be square wave like this, but it always remains true that there will
be more power loss in a non-DC waveform.
Choosing a frequency based on motor characteristics
One way to choose a suitable frequency is to say, for example, that we want the current
waveform to be stable to within p percent. Then we can work out mathematically the minimum
frequency to attain this goal. This section is a bit mathematical so you may wish to miss it out
and just use the final equation.
The following shows the equivalent circuit of the motor, and the current waveform as the PWM
signal switches on and off. This shows the worst case, at 50:50 PWM ratio, and the current rise is
shown for a stationary or stalled motor, which is also worst case.

T is the switching period, which is the reciprocal of the switching frequency. Just taking the
falling edge of the current waveform, this is given by the equation

is the time constant of the circuit, which is L / R.
So the current at time t = T/2 (i
1
) must be no less than P% lower than at t = 0 (i
0
). This means
there is a limiting condition:

So:

Lets try some values in this to see what frequencies we get. A Ford Fiesta starter motor has the
following approximate parameters:
R = 0.04
L = 70H
We must also include in the resistance the on-resistance of the MOSFETs being used, say 2 x
10m, giving a total resistance of R = 0.06 .
Percentage frequency
1 42 kHz
5 8.2 kHz
10 4 kHz
20 1900 Hz
50 610 Hz
A graph can be drawn for this particular motor:

Looking at the above graph, a reasonably low ripple can be achieved with a switching frequency
of as little as 5kHz.
Unfortunately, motor manufacturers rarely publish values of coil inductance in their datasheets,
so the only way to find out is to measure it. This requires sensitive LCR bridge test equipment
which is rather expensive to buy. However, from the 4QD site, they quote the Lynch motor with
an inductance of 39H as being one of the lowest.
3. Speed control circuits
We will start off with a very simple circuit (see the figure below). The inductance of the field windings
and the armature windings have been lumped together and called L
a
. The resistance of the windings and
brushes is not important to this discussion, and so has not been drawn.
Q1 is the MOSFET. When Q1 is on, current flows through the field and armature windings, and
the motor rotates. When Q1 is turned off , the current through an inductor cannot immediately
turn off, and so the inductor voltage drives a diminishing current in the same direction, which
will now flow through the armature, and back through D1 as shown by the red arrow in the
figure below. If D1 wasnt in place, a very large voltage would build up across Q1 and blow it
up.