DC/DC buck power converter as a smooth starter for a DC motor based on a hierarchical control

In this paper a smooth starter, based on a dc/dc Buck power converter, for the angular velocity trajectory tracking task of a dc permanent magnet motor is presented. To this end, a hierarchical controller is designed, which is integrated by a control associated with the dc motor based on differential flatness at the high level, and a control related with the dc/dc Buck converter based on a cascade control scheme at the low level. The control at the high level allows the dc motor angular velocity to track a desired trajectory and also provides the desired voltage profile that must be tracked by the output voltage of the dc/dc Buck power converter. In order to assure the latter, a cascade control at the low level is designed, considering a sliding mode control for the inner current loop and a proportional-integral control for the outer voltage loop. The hierarchical controller is tested through experiments using MATLAB-Simulink and the DS1104 board from dSPACE. The obtained results show that the desired angular velocity trajectory is well tracked under abrupt variations in the system parameters and that the controller is robust in such operation conditions, confirming the validity of the proposed controller.