DC Motor Cruise Control by Interfacing IR Sensor Tachometer and SIMULINK, Regardless Motor Specifications and Change of Shaft Load

Abstract

DC motor could be controlled different ways with different approaches. One of the problems has been identifying internal specifications of DC motor such as Torque constant, back-emf constant, viscous friction constant, internal resistance and inductance. These parameters are needed for modelling the system of a DC motor. Unfortunately, those are not specified in most commercially manufactured DC motor's data sheet. Most popular controlling methods available are PID controller, Adaptive controller or intelligent controller in some cases. Proposed experiment disregards all these problems and methods mentioned above to build a very simple, effective and cheap cruise controller of a DC motor. This experiment divided into two key parts; first phase focuses on a simple IR sensor tachometer designing in microcontroller (LPC1768 ARM) platform which performs DAC (digital to analog conversion) in essence. Tachometer's RPM reading gives the feedback into controller function to compare against the desired RPM set by the user until they align on the same line. A SIMULINK diagram has been implemented in ARDUINO Mega for the cruise control which contains controller function. Results analyzed for different RPM and concludes the system's high efficiency for RPM range between 300–1200.