The brushless direct current (BLDC) motors have many advantages over brushed DC motors and induction motors, such as better speed versus torque characteristics, good dynamic response, higher efficiency and large speed ranges. Various applications such as consumer electronics, medical electronics employ BLDC motors and hence it is important to develop efficient controllers. This paper presents the development of a virtual motor, a set of programs that represent the BLDC motor, which is modelled and simulated in MATLAB/Simulink. The BLDC motor characteristics are then implemented on the Spartan 3E field programmable gate array (FPGA) using Verilog HDL. Such a virtual motor allows for realizing motors of various ratings by change of the parameters. This is used as a virtual motor for the testing and validation of digital controllers without the risk of damage in extreme conditions of operations, in addition, this can also be used for educational purposes. Experimental verifications using the virtual motor and the BLDC motor using the FPGA controller give similar results, validating the model used.

BLDC simulation, MATLAB/Simulink model, virtual motor, FPGA implementation, controller validation.