Positioning Control for Voice Coil Motor Using Unbalanced Multilevel Inverter Topology

This article proposes a new multi-level inverter (MLI) based on flying capacitor inverter (FCI), with focused on high-precision positioning control for a voice coil motor (VCM). Multi-level inverters (MLIs) have the characteristic that increasing the number of output voltage levels reduces the output voltage error. However, as the number of levels increases, the number of circuit elements increases, and the circuit becomes more complex. In addition, the output voltage amplitude for each level is constant in conventional inverters. As a result, such as high-precision positioning control of VCM, designing an appropriate inverter for a reference wave that contains a large amount of low-voltage components increases the number of circuit elements. Therefore, this paper proposes a MLI with two unbalanced dc-input voltages, referred to as unbalanced MLIs (UMLIs) hereinafter. This topology uses two different dc-input voltages, and it is possible to reduce the output voltage level in extremely low-voltage range compared to other voltage levels. Simulation results when the high-precision positioning control of the VCM confirm that the proposed UMLIs improves the control performance compared to the conventional FCIs with equal number of output voltage levels and uniform level widths.