Brushless DC Motor Control Technology to Realize Efficient Driving of Cooling Fans Technical Review

PublishTime：2021-06-25

●The demand for data centers is increasing with the ongoing digitization of society. To reduce the power consumption of data centers, it has become indispensable to improve the efficiency of the large number of motors that power the cooling fans generally used in data center servers.Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation developed Intelligent Phase Control, a technology that can achieve high-efficiency driving of a three-phase brushless direct current (BLDC) motor using three Hall sensors, and applied this technology to a three-phase BLDC motor driver integrated circuit (IC) in February 2016. We have newly developed both a Hall sensor position compensation function to reduce the number of Hall sensors from three to one in order to save the installation space for cooling fans and a closed-loop speed control function to realize stable rotation speed under any load conditions. We commercialized the TC78B025FTG three-phase BLDC motor driver IC with Intelligent Phase Control incorporating these functions in April 2018.
●Introduction
■In recent years, the emergence of big data and the Internet of Things (IoT) has been driving the demand for data centers to store and process huge amounts of information. The power consumption of data centers is growing every year, currently accounting for approximately 2% of the world’s energy demand. Roughly 30% of the power consumed by data centers is used to cool servers(1). Forced-air cooling using fans is the most widely used method for this purpose. It is therefore important to improve the drive efficiency of fan motors in order to reduce the power consumption of data centers.
■Cooling fans with a three-phase BLDC motor are increasingly used in data centers because three-phase BLDC motors are not only more energy-efficient but also produce less vibration than other types of motors. Surface permanent magnet (SPM) motors, which have magnets on the surface of the motor rotor, are the most commonly used type of three-phase BLDC motors for cooling fan applications. To improve the efficiency of a fan motor, it is necessary to adjust the phase of the motor drive voltage (i.e., auto control the lead angle) according to a motor’s operating conditions so that the phase of the motor’s induced voltage matches that of the motor current. However, lead angle adjustment is a complicated and time-consuming task.
■To date, Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation has developed Intelligent Phase Control, a proprietary technology with a simple system configuration to automatically improve the drive efficiency of SPM BLDC motors using three Hall sensors, and incorporated Intelligent Phase Control into its motor driver integrated circuits (ICs). This report describes an overview of Intelligent Phase Control, an enhancement of Intelligent Phase Control that realizes three-phase BLDC motors with only one Hall sensor for cooling fans for data centers, and the application of the enhanced Intelligent Phase Control to a motor driver IC.

Brand of Product：	TOSHIBA
Part#：	TC78B025FTG More Part#
Product Category：	Brushless DC Motor 、 three-phase BLDC motor driver IC More
Application：	More
Data Type：	Supplier and Product Introduction More
Safety & Environment Standards：	More
Operating Temperature：	Please see the document for details
Qualification Grade：	More
Qualification Approval：	More
Package：	VQFN24
Language：	English Chinese Chinese and English Japanese
Date of Creation：	2020/04/05
Version Number：
Data Encoding：
Data Size：	978 KB

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