Decision Based Control Approach for BLDC Motor Drive in Pedal Assisted Electric Bicycle

The electric bicycle is powered by a battery to provide "assist". The assist control is provided by a pedal assist sensor or a throttle sensor. This article presents a simple decision-based control approach for the brushless DC (BLDC) motor of pedal assisted electric bicycle. The duty cycle of the motor is controlled via user input through throttle sensor, feedback information of the pedal via the pedal assist sensor (PAS), and speed feedback using speed sensor. A sensorless field-oriented control (FOC) algorithm is used for the control of BLDC motor to realize an efficient system. The overall system is designed, and hardware implementation is carried out. The steady-state performance, dynamic performance and the thermal performance of the overall system is validated on the developed hardware prototype.