A3 Motor & Motion College

About the course

The purpose of this course is to provide fundamental concepts and knowledge necessary to understand, apply and design various DC/AC motor drives. This course is intended for design engineers, field application engineers and sales/management people in the motion control industry who wish to clarify basic principles of power electronics, motor control, drive hardware and software as well as servo systems.

The course will also include a brief discussion on the magnetic and mechanical structure of the various motor types to understand torque production mechanisms and to derive a circuit model. The content will cover most of the basic components and their functions of brushless DC and induction motor drives including power electronic circuits, microprocessor and logic hardware, and feedback sensors, with particular emphasis on motor control and servo systems. From the author’s experience in research and development of many different types of drives, practical and useful procedures in selecting components and technologies, rule-of-thumb design rules, performance versus cost tradeoff, etc. will be discussed.

About the Instructor

Dr. Dal Y. Ohm is the president of Drivetech, Inc., a technical consulting firm specializing in design and development of motor control, drives and renewable energy converter systems. He has more than 25 years of industrial and academic experience in research and product development in motor drives, servo systems, and power converters. His major areas of interest include motion control, digital control and robotics, Field Oriented and sensorless control, AC and DC motor drives and power electronics. He has more than 50 published articles and conference presentations in the above areas.

Prior to consulting, he was Technical Director at Kollmorgen Motion Technologies Group. He was also with Baldor Electric Company and Electrocraft Inc. He taught engineering courses (Electric Machines, Robotics, Digital Control) at San Jose State University, NPU, and Cogswell Polytechnical College as Adjunct Professor for many years. Dr. Ohm received PhD and MS degrees in Electrical Engineering from Texas A&M University. He is a member of IEEE, SAE and MCMA.