Development of External Rotor Single-Phase

PM BLDC Motor Based Drive for Ceiling Fan

Mohammed Fazil and K R Rajagopal, Senior Member, IEEE

design and its influence on the performance and the torque

Abstract—Permanent magnet brushless dc (PM BLDC)
motors offer various advantages such as high efficiency,
compactness and easy controllability which are absolutely
beneficial in domestic appliances. Ceiling fans, in general, are
driven by single-phase induction motors with an overall system
efficiency of about 30%. This paper presents the design, analysis,
and development of a 170 V, 20 W, 360 rpm, single-phase PM
BLDC motor meant for use in ceiling fan, which becomes a cost
effective high efficiency solution for this high volume domestic
appliance. The developed motor, on testing gave an efficiency of
about 50% when fitted to a ceiling fan delivering the same air
delivery.
ripple has been reported [2]-[5]. Dynamic modelling of the
single-phase PM BLDC motor and the driving circuit have
been reported [6]-[9].
In this paper, virtual proto typing of single phase PM BLDC
motor along with the design, finite element analysis and
dynamic modelling of the drive have been presented. The
design of the single-phase PM BLDC motor is validated with
the prototype single-phase PM BLDC motor for ceiling fan.
II. VIRTUAL PROTOTYPING

Index Terms— Brushless motor, Ceiling fan, Finite element

analysis, Motor, Permanent Magnet Motor, Single phase PM
BLDC motor.

I. INTRODUCTION

PERMANENT brushless dc (PM BLDC) motor uses

permanent magnets on the rotor for field excitation and
electronically commutated winding on the stator. The rare
earth magnets helps to make these motors efficient and
compact compared to the induction motors and mechanically
commutated dc motors. Single-phase PM BLDC motors,
though less efficient compared to the three-phase PM BLDC
motors, are cost effective and easy to mass manufacture. They
are used in applications which require output power ranging
from a fraction of watts to less than hundred watts.
Non-salient permanent magnet motors have two types of
torque acting on the rotor; the excitation and the cogging
torque [1]. Excitation torque is generated due to the interaction Fig. 1. Product design and development flow chart based on virtual
of the winding current and the permanent magnet field, prototyping
whereas the cogging torque is due to the interaction of the
stator tooth and the permanent magnet. The uniform airgap Product design and development flow chart for the single-
single-phase PM BLDC motors have coincident zero torque phase PM BLDC motor is shown in Fig.1. A uniform airgap
positions of excitation and cogging torques which makes them single-phase PM BDLC motor is designed based on the
inherently not self starting. Asymmetric airgap is introduced customer requirements by using baseline design and analysis
to shift the zero position of the cogging torque from that of the program. This is further evaluated by the finite element (FE)
excitation torque making them self starting. analysis for the designed motor. The design is found alright
Various design parameters, especially the airgap profile after analyzing the results of the FE analysis, an asymmetric
airgap is determined based on the starting torque requirement.
The proposed design will further be analyzed with the help of
Mohammed Fazil and K. R. Rajagopal are with the Department of the reported dynamic model [7] to evaluate the transient and
Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi
110016, India (e-mail: mohammedfazil@gmail.com, rgopal@ee.iitd.ac.in). the steady state performances. The estimation accuracy of the
virtual proto typing can be improved by modifying the design
978-1-4244-7781-4/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE programs and dynamic model based on the test results from
the initial stages of the product life cycle.
A. Design Template for the Motor
A baseline design and analysis template has been created
based on the magnetic circuit and electric circuit design
equation [10]. A ceiling fan motor with a rating of 170 V, 20
W, 360 rpm has to be developed. A standard casing is
developed for testing various fan motor proto types based on
the existing fan motor casing dimensions, which limit the
outer diameter of the machine to 104 mm, pack length to 11
mm and the shaft diameter of 15.2 mm. A permanent magnet
of remnant flux density 0.634 T and coercivity 413 KA/m Fig. 4. Flux density distribution of a pole of the 8-pole motor
with thickness of 3.5 mm is used. The outer and inner
diameters are decided based on the flux density constraints of Figure 4 shows the flux density distribution of the 8-pole
the rotor back iron. A 34 standard wire gauge (SWG) wire is motor. As observed from the plot the magnetic structure is not
used for the winding. The designs are developed for six to saturated.
sixteen pole motors. After analysing the design it is found that
the efficiency increases with the number of poles, as shown in
C. Design of Non Uniform Airgap Profile and Starting
Fig. 2. As shown in Fig. 3, when the slots become narrower
Torque Determination
and the standard slot fill factor decreases.
FE analysis has been carried out to evaluate the starting
torque at the starting current for different airgap profiles by
changing the minimum and maximum airgap distances. Figure
5 shows the variation in the starting torque with different
airgap profiles. Profile number 3 meets starting torque criteria
of 60% of the full load torque and therefore considered.

Fig. 2. Variation of efficiency with number of poles

Fig. 5. Variation of the starting torque with airgap profiles

D. Performance evaluation using dynamic model

The dynamic model of the PM BLDC motor drive [7] is
utilized in this work and the schematic representation is shown
in Fig. 6.

III. PROTOTYPE DEVELOPMENT AND TESTING

Fig. 3. Variation of slot fill factor with number of poles
Since the motor being developed is for a ceiling fan
application, which is being mass produced, ease of
manufacturing is an important criterion. Therefore, the 8-pole
model has been considered for the proto manufacturing.
B. Finite Element Analysis of the Design
The stator laminations are manufactured by punching.
Punching tools have been developed based on the finalized
design of the laminations and used for manufacturing the
stator stack. Stator laminations are held together by riveting.
Lamination material used is non oriented silicon steel of grade
M-45. Motor casing (ceiling fan without blade and motor) is
manufactured using aluminium pressure die casting method.
Fig. 6. Dynamic model of the single-phase PM BLDC motor

Aluminium grade used for the aluminium pressure die Figure 7 shows the photograph of the developed motor and
casting method is LM24. Rotor back core is made of REMKO Fig. 8 shows the analyzed ceiling fan test set up with the
or soft iron and press fitted to the casing. Neodymium iron developed single-phase PM BLDC motor.
boron (Nd-Fe-B) halbach magnet is press fitted to the rotor
back iron. Loctite adhesive is used in between casing and rotor
back iron and also between back iron and magnet.

Fig. 7. Stator assembly inside rotor casing Fig. 8. Test set up of ceiling fan

Fig. 9. Variation of the speed of ceiling fan with voltage
Fig. 10. Variation of source current of the ceiling fan with voltage
Fig. 11. Variation of power input with voltage
Figures 9 and 10 show the variation of the speed and source
current with voltage, respectively. From Fig. 11 it is observed
that at the rated voltage of 170 V, the input power is 40 W
resulting in an increased efficiency of 50 % for a 20 W output.
This when compared with the 70W taken by the conventional
induction motor driven ceiling fan, is vey promising.
IV. CONCLUSIONS
Design and development of a single-phase PM BLDC
motor based on virtual proto-type concept has been carried
out. This approach helps to prevent manufacturing multiple
proto types and reduces the product development cycle time.
The developed motor gives better performance than the
conventional single-phase induction motor used in such
ceiling fans. The efficiency has been increased from 30 % to
50%. As the motor is a single-phase one, the cost of the drive
circuit will also be less and the motor overall cost will be
comparable to that of the single-phase induction motor. It is
found that the developed motor gives performance fairly
matching with the calculated results.
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