Position sensorless drive of linear pulse motor for suppressing transient vibration

The linear pulse motor (LPM) has been widely used because of its simple structure and ease of control without the use of feedback. However, the transient vibration inherent in the LPM results in degraded response performance. The fastest way to suppress the vibration is to close the control loop by means of a position feedback sensor. But the straightforward use of such a sensor feedback results in high cost and a complicated configuration and therefore sacrifices the structural advantages of the LPM. The authors therefore propose Kalman filter-based position sensor control as a means of suppressing transient vibration. In this proposed control method, the mover position and speed are optimally estimated by using an extended Kalman filter applied to the nonlinear state equation of the excitation winding circuits. The effectiveness of this control method is demonstrated by experiments on a prototype LPM system using a DSP. (C) 2000 Scripta Technica.