Cruise Control of BLDC Motors Using GA-Optimized Super Twisted Sliding Mode Control

The rapid development and growing popularity of brushless motors (BLDC) in industrial, automotive and aerospace applications poses a series of inherent challenges, such as precise speed and torque control and, above all, reduced energy efficiency. This work alleviates the above problems by proposing a speed control scheme for brushless motors that takes into account all external disturbances, in particular the variability of load torque with the operating environment. The proposed scheme relies on the use of a controller based on the super-twist sliding mode control strategy (STSMC), whose parameters are optimized using a genetic algorithm (GA). To study the controller’s performance and robustness, two test cases were simulated on Matlab/Simulink. The first consisted in verifying tracking performance against a user-specified speed reference value, and the second in checking robustness in the face of an external disturbance, a time-varying load torque. The recorded performances show a motor response time of between 0.02 s and 0.05 s for constant torque, and between 0.02 s and 0.06 s in the presence of disturbances. This performance verifies the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed control strategy, establishing its viability in dynamic operation.