International Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering (IJECE) Vol. 12, No. 5, October 2022, pp. 4832~4840 ISSN: 2088-8708, DOI: 10.11591/ijece.v12i5.pp4832-4840  4832 Journal homepage: http://ijece.iaescore.com Sensored speed control of brushless DC motor based salp swarm algorithm Wisam Najm Al-Din Abed 1 , Omar Abbood Imran 2 , Ali Najim Abdullah 1 1 Department of Electrical Power and Machines Engineering, College of Engineering, Diyala University, Baqubah, Iraq 2 Department of Chemical Engineering, College of Engineering, Diyala University, Baqubah, Iraq Article Info ABSTRACT Article history: Received Aug 2, 2021 Revised May 14, 2022 Accepted Jun 5, 2022 This article uses one of the newest and efficient meta-heuristic optimization algorithms inspired from nature called salp swarm algorithm (SSA). It imitates the exploring and foraging behavior of salps in oceans. SSA is proposed for parameters tuning of speed controller in brushless DC (BLDC) motor to achieve the best performance. The suggested work modeling and control scheme is done using MATLAB/Simulink and coding environments. In this work, a 6-step inverter is feeding a BLDC motor with a Hall sensor effect. The proposed technique is compared with other nature-inspired techniques such as cuckoo search optimizer (CSO), honey bee optimization (HBO), and flower pollination algorithm (FPA) under the same operating conditions. This comparison aims to show the superiority features of the proposed tuning technique versus other optimization strategies. The proposed tuning technique shows superior optimization features versus other bio-inspired tuning methods that are used in this work. It improves the controller performance of BLDC motor. It refining the speed response features which results in decreasing the rising time, steady-state error, peak overshoot, and settling time. Keywords: 6 Steps inverter Brushless DC motor Hall sensor Metaheuristic Salp swarm algorithm This is an open access article under the CC BY-SA license. Corresponding Author: Wisam Najm Al-Din Abed Department of Electrical Power and Machines Engineering, Diyala University Baqubah, Iraq Email: wisam_alobaidee@yahoo.com, wisam_alobaidee1@uodiyala.edu.iq 1. INTRODUCTION Nowadays, brushless DC motor (BLDC) motors play a vital role in various industrial, medical, military, aerospace, robotic, and automotive applications. BLDC motor characterized by, low maintenance, silent operation, more reliability, long operating life, fast dynamic response, high efficiency, preferable speed/torque characteristics, wide speed range and higher torque/weight percentage [1]–[7]. BLDC motor has three-phase stator windings and a permanent-magnet rotor. Its structure is similar to permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) with a quasi-rectangular current waveform as well as a trapezoidal back electromotive force (BEMF) waveform [1], [2], [8], [9]. In this motor, an electronically current commutation arrangement is implemented due to the absence of brushes. Electronically commutation arrangement is used instead of mechanical commutation which is based on the rotor position feedback. The feedback information is supplied either based on sensor or sensorless technique [1], [3], [10]. The rotor position is a typical operation of BLDC with the help of hall sensors. This sensor is used to find the position of rotor. The rotor angular speed and position are detected using this sensor for motor speed controlling. It detects rotor transition from one sector to another sector instead of detecting accurately where the rotor is within a sector. So, Hall effect sensors provide the necessary information to specify when the motor correct phases are needed to be commutated with each sector crossing. A commutation logic circuit is used to detect the correct