Today's state-of-the-art high-end appliances are more energy efficient, consume less water, and are smarter than the machines developed in years past. Texas Instruments has developed products to meet the challenges and requirements for these new sophisticated systems.
Energy Efficiency: Home appliance (a.k.a. white goods) motors are often oversized to account for the load torque changes and transients. Scalar techniques for control can result in inefficient systems and noisy operation. This, in turn, leads to a mediocre energy efficiency that hovers in the 40% to 50% range. By implementing the control system with TI's digital signal controllers, designers are able to implement smaller, quieter motors with energy efficiency as high as 85% - 90%. A high efficiency is necessary to receive a stamp of approval from a governing body such as the US Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy's STAR rating.
Power Factor Correction (PFC): PFC is a technique of counteracting the undesirable effects of electric loads that create a power factor that is less than 1. In washing machines, PFC is needed because of the continuous transients and surge currents exhibited by the electric motor during the wash cycle, for example. It is also used to boost the rectified mains voltage up to 300 V to 450 V, which is then used to power the 3-phase inverters which ultimately operate the electric motor. With TI products, PFC can be performed externally with a separate integrated circuit or it can be done in the digital signal controller eliminating the need for a separate external PFC controller.
IEC 60730 Compliance: Home appliance manufacturers continually introduce new design enhancements to their automatic electronic controls that ensure safe, reliable and efficient operation of the equipment. Among other things, the IEC 60730 specification discusses mechanical, electrical, electronic, EMC, and abnormal operation of AC appliances. For microcontrollers, the specification details new test and diagnostic methods for the real-time embedded software to ensure the safe operation of embedded control hardware and software. All TI TMSxx24xxxx and TMSxx28xxxx digital signal controllers support IEC 60730 compliance.
High-Voltage Isolation: For larger, higher-performance products where reliability and motor-control accuracy are key concerns, TI offers isolation products that block high voltage, isolate grounds, and prevent noise currents from entering the local ground and interfering with or damaging sensitive circuitry.
Integration: Texas Instruments provides fully-integrated solutions such as the digital signal controllers (for digital motor control, PFC, and other system functions), and relay drivers that provide up to 8 channels, zero-volt detection, and 5 V linear regulation for 5 V logic that may reside on the board.
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