HiCurrent Motor Driver

Customer

Airbus Helicopters

Action delivered

Design & Prototyping

Area

Aerospace

HiCurrent Motor Driver

Development of a full custom motor driver and its control loops for a brushless DC motor.

Low voltage, high power motor driver

Airbus helicopter, our customer, needs to drive a high power brushless DC motor with the onboard helicopter battery, rated at 28 V DC. These low voltage and high power imply very high current. Connectors, Busbars, DC link capacitors and mosfet modules arrangement have been specifically designed to handle such high current.

Custom control to limit the losses

The control has been developed to limit the switching and conduction losses which are critical with this amount of current. A modified Field Oriented Control, with a specific switching pattern has been used to reach an inverter efficiency up to 98%, and enable air cooling. The control, including field weakening techniques, the power stage and the motor have been modeled on PSIM platform.