Design and Simulation of Fuzzy logic controller for Speed Control of Separately
Excited D.C. Motor
Ramesh Singh and A.K.Singh
Department of Electrical Engineering
N.I.T. Jamshedpur.
ABSTRACT
In past only conventional controllers were
used and their design laws were based either
on time domain or frequency domain. Now
with the advancement in technology, artificial
intelligence (AI) tools such as expert
systems, fuzzy logic and neural networks are
being used for the design of controllers. They
are expected to usher a new era in power and
motion control in the coming decades. Today
fuzzy logic has emerged as one of the most
active and fruitful areas for research in the
application for control engineering. Fuzzy
control is based on fuzzy logic – a logical
system that is much closer in spirit to human
thinking and natural language than traditional
logical systems. The fuzzy logic controller
(FLC) based on fuzzy logic provides a means
of converting a linguistic control strategy
based on expert knowledge into an automatic
control strategy. In our present work, we
design a fuzzy controller to control the speed
of a separately - excited DC motor with
different membership functions and
defuzzification methods.
Keywords: Fuzzy Logic, Fuzzy logic
controller, Membership function,
Defuzzification, MATLAB.
INTRODUCTION
Electrical machines play an important role in
industry as well as our day-to-day life. They
are used to generate electrical powering
power plants and provide mechanical work in
industries. They are also an indispensable
part of our daily lives. DC machines are
considered to be most versatile machine as its
torque-speed characteristics can be controlled
over a wide range and thus offer economic
and technical advantage in various fields of
application. A DC machine can operate either
as a generator or as a motor but at present its
use as a generator is limited because of the
widespread use of AC power. Large DC
motors are used in machine tools, printing
presses, conveyers, fans, pumps, hoists,
cranes, paper mills, textile mills and so forth.
Small DC machines (in fractional horse
power rating) are used primarily as control
devices such as tacho-generator for speed
sensing and servomotors for positioning and
tracking. DC motors still dominate as traction
motors used in transit cars and locomotives,
as the torque-speed characteristics of DC
motors can be varied over a wide range while
retaining high efficiency. Thus, DC machine
definitely plays an important role in industry.
DC machines are very popular as its torque-
speed characteristics can be varied over a
wide range. These characteristics are highly
dependent on load variation and thus there an
increasing need for a good controller to
perform tight regulation under high
unpredictable load variations. The traditional
solution has been choosing linear control
techniques usually based on frequency
domain, but this method has turned out to be
occasionally inefficient and its behavior can
be improved where the operating conditions
are far from the nominal operation.
In order to overcome these limitations,
intelligent control techniques have recently
arisen as an important alternative to linear
controllers in the field of power and control.
In the domain of control systems, fuzzy logic
proved very useful and very suitable for
systems without mathematical models and
systems with too much uncertainty. In a way,
it came to the rescue when conventional
methods started to reach dead ends.
In this work, principle of fuzzy logic is
incorporated for designing a speed controller
of the DC drive. For carrying out the work,
the simplified transfer function of separately
exited DC motor is obtained. We can
represent the system by a controller and plant
as shown in Fig.No.3. Controller is
implemented before the plant to improve the
performance. In place of controller different
types of controllers as PI, PID and Fuzzy
logic controllers are taken for analysis.
 DC MOTOR DRIVE SYSTEM

An armature controlled separately exited DC

Motor shown in Fig.No.4 is considered,
where
Ra=armature resistance in Ohms
La=armature inductance in Henry
Ia=armature current in ampere
If=field current in ampere
ea=applied armature voltage in Volts
eb=back emf in Volts
Ө= angular displacement of the motor shaft
in radian
The equation below represents the transfer
function of the plant under consideration Fig. No. 2

P(s)= K

J La s2 + (f0La + JRa) s + (f0Ra + K2)

Motor parameters obtained from a

paper by Y.Tipsuwan and M.Y.Chow in IEEE
Transaction on Fuzzy systems (1999) are as
follows: -
Ra=4.67Ω ; La=8.463 H ;
f0=0.11723Nm/rad/sec;
J=0.10559 Kgm2 ; KT=0.7318 Nm/A ;
Kb=0.7318 volts/rad/sec; Fig.No.3

Transfer function of the plant is

obtained as (La is not neglected here)

P(s)= 0.7318

0.8937s2+1.485s+1.3146

BLOCK DIAGRAM

Fig.No.4

DESIGN OF FUZZY LOGIC

CONTROLLER

Fuzzy logic, the logic of approximate

reasoning, is an innovative technology that
enables users to describe a desired system
behavior using everyday spoken language. In
general, a FLC consists of a set of linguistic
statements, which define a set of control
protocol relating the control conditions to
control actions by “If-then” rules. It uses
membership functions to define the degree to
which crisp physical values belong to terms
in a linguistic variable set.
 The FLC consists of mainly three basic
components, namely the Fuzzification, Fuzzy
Engine (rule base) and Defuzzification. The
Fuzzification transforms the analog input
signal into linguistic fuzzy variable in
between 0 and 1. The fuzzy engine handles
rule inference where the variables are
articulate in the “If-then” rules. The
Defuzzification transforms the fuzzy control
actions to continuous signals that can be
applied to the system. Motor speed is picked
up and the speed error (e) is determined by
subtracting the motor speed from its
reference speed (ωr).
e = ωr – ω
Speed error and the rate of change of error
are the two inputs to FLC.
The following linguistic variables are used
for the input variable:
P=Positive Z=Zero
NS=Negative Small
NM=NegativeMedium
NB=Negative Big
MATLAB, namely triangular, trapezoidal and
bell shaped.
SIMULATION
MATLAB simulation is carried out with the
following model. Fuzzy logic controller has
fifteen rules; there are two inputs to the FLC,
namely error and change of error. There is
one output. There are three error MF’s, five
rate of error MF’s and three output MF’s.
Mamdani interface is used for simulation.
Simulation is carried out with various
combinations of types of MF’s (Triangular,
Trapezoidal and Bell shaped) and different
defuzzification techniques (Centroid,
Bisector and Mom).

Rules for the Fuzzy logic controller

Rate of error NL NM NS Z P
Error
N N N N N Z
Z N N N Z P
P Z P P P P

The output data of the fuzzy controller is the

DC voltage that is given to the plant. Fig.No.5. -Simulation model
RESULT and CONCLUSION
The fuzzy logic controller was used to
control the DC motor speed with unit step
input. The graphical responses of open loop,
closed loop without any controller, closed
loop with PI and PID controllers, closed loop
with fuzzy logic controller has been shown
below. The three membership functions of
FLC namely triangular, trapezoidal and bell
shaped where used with different
defuzification methods (Centroid, Bisector
and Mom) where used to control the speed of
Fig. Surface view of Rules
the motor, the result of which is summarized
below.
The derivation of the fuzzy control rules is
TRIANGULAR membership function
based on the following criteria: Defuzzificatio Peak Error(% Tr(s) Ts(s)
1) If the output is far from the set point, control n method overshoot(%) )
must be large to bring the output to the set
point. Centroid (1) 4.22 0 2.73 8.54
2) If the output is approaching the set point, the Bisector (2) 0.91 0 3.42 7.1
change is rather small. Mom (3) 0.68 0 3.9 8.3
3) If the set point is reached and the output is Table 1
steady, the control remains unchanged.
In this paper three types of membership TRAPEZOIDAL membership function
Defuzzificatio
Peak Error(% Tr(s) Ts(s)
functions are used in the simulation using
n method overshoot(%) )
Centroid (4) 2.97 0 3.57 8.90
Bisector (5) 0.82 0 3.63 6.98
Mom (6) 0.67 0 3.9 7.2
Table 2
GBELL membership function
Defuzzificatio Peak Error(% Tr(s) Ts(s)
n method overshoot(%) )
Centroid (7) 5.05 0.101 2.66 9.02
Bisector (8) 0.97 0 3.53 6.62
Mom (9) 0.76 0 3.82 6.8
Table 3
FIG(4)

FIGURES

FIG(5)

FIG(1)

FIG(6)

FIG(2)

FIG(7)

FIG(3)
 compromise between both and hence is most
used also. The system was observed to be
more sensitive by making the width of the
membership function narrow in the midrange
around zero and broader as we move away
from zero.
REFERENCES
1. L.A.Zadeh, “Fuzzy sets”, Information and control, vol.8,
pp.338-353,1965.
2. E.H.Mamdani, “Application of Fuzzy algorithms for
control of Simple Dynamic Plant”, Proc.IEE,vol 12,
no.12, pp.1585-1588,1974.
3. B.K.Bose, “Expert system, Fuzzy logic, and Neural
Network Applications in Power electronics and Motion
Control”, Proc. Of the IEEE, vol.82, no.8, Aug 1995,
pp.1303-1322.
FIG(8) 4. Jan Jantzen, “Design of Fuzzy Controllers”, Tech.report
no.98-E 864(design),19 Aug 1998.
5. Yodyium Tipsuwan and Mo-Yuen Chow, “Fuzzy logic
microcontroller implementation for DC motor speed
control”, IEEE transaction on Fuzzy Systems, 1999.
6. Bogumila Mrozek and Zbigniew Mrozek, “Modelling
and Fuzzy control of DC Drive”, 14th European
Simulation Multiconference ESM 2000, May 23-26,
Ghent, pp.186-190.
7. Era purwanto et.al., “Simulation of the Application
Fuzzylogic Controller in 3 phase induction motor speed
control by selecting Membership function”, Proc. Of
IEEE TENCON’02.
8. P.Phokharatkul and S.Phaiboon, “Mobile Robot control
using type-2 fuzzy logic system”, IEEE conference on
Robotics, Automation and Mechatronics, vol.1, Dec-
2004,pp.296-299.
9. I.J.Nagrath and M.Gopal, “Control Systems
FIG(9) Engineering”, forth edition, New Age International
Publishers.

After simulation of the system we easily see

that the plant response is greatly improved by
using the Fuzzy controller as compared to
conventional controllers like PI and PID
controllers. The response shows that the peak
overshoot is greatly reduced and the settling
time is also decreased, but the rise time is
increased.
From the above tables we can clearly
understand that the peak overshoot is
minimum for Mom method of defuzification
whereas the rise time is minimum for
Centroid method and the Bisector method
gives the minimum settling time. When we
compare the different membership functions
which are employed in our FLC the we see
the out of the three MF’s the trapezoidal
membership function gives the minimum
peak overshoot, rise time is minimum for
both trapezoidal and bell shaped MF . The
steady state error is zero in all cases.
The oscillations encountered when triangular
MF was used where greatly reduced in the
other two cases. Also oscillations are
minimum in the case of Bell shaped MF. The
triangular membership function is also not
showing a poor response, it is only that it is