I designed an H-Bridge circuit that I will use to drive a 12V wiper motor that can draw 6A. Will this work? Should I just use relays? I want to be able to control speed as well. I will be controlling the PWM and the switching through an Arduino.
Electrical – MOSFET H-Bridge with PWM for motor control – will this circuit work?
h-bridgemosfetpwm
Related Solutions
I'm not sure why you think BJTs are significantly slower than power MOSFETs; that's certainly not an inherent characteristic. But there's nothing wrong with using FETs if that's what you prefer.
And MOSFET gates do indeed need significant amounts of current, especially if you want to switch them quickly, to charge and discharge the gate capacitance — sometimes up to a few amps! Your 10K gate resistors are going to significantly slow down your transitions. Normally, you'd use resistors of just 100Ω or so in series with the gates, for stability.
If you really want fast switching, you should use special-purpose gate-driver ICs between the PWM output of the MCU and the power MOSFETs. For example, International Rectifier has a wide range of driver chips, and there are versions that handle the details of the high-side drive for the P-channel FETs for you.
Additional:
How fast do you want the FETs to switch? Each time one switches on or off, it's going to dissipate a pulse of energy during the transition, and the shorter you can make this, the better. This pulse, multiplied by the PWM cycle frequency, is one component of the average power the FET needs to dissipate — often the dominant component. Other components include the on-state power (ID2 × RDS(ON) multiplied by the PWM duty cycle) and any energy dumped into the body diode in the off state.
One simple way to model the switching losses is to assume that the instantaneous power is roughly a triangular waveform whose peak is (VCC/2)×(ID/2) and whose base is equal to the transition time TRISE or TFALL. The area of these two triangles is the total switching energy dissipated during each full PWM cycle: (TRISE + TFALL) × VCC × ID / 8. Multiply this by the PWM cycle frequency to get the average switching-loss power.
The main thing that dominates the rise and fall times is how fast you can move the gate charge on and off the gate of the MOSFET. A typical medium-size MOSFET might have a total gate charge on the order of 50-100 nC. If you want to move that charge in, say, 1 µs, you need a gate driver capable of at least 50-100 mA. If you want it to switch twice as fast, you need twice the current.
If we plug in all the numbers for your design, we get: 12V × 3A × 2µs / 8 × 32kHz = 0.288 W (per MOSFET). If we assume RDS(ON) of 20mΩ and a duty cycle of 50%, then the I2R losses will be 3A2 × 0.02Ω × 0.5 = 90 mW (again, per MOSFET). Together, the two active FETs at any given moment are going to be dissipating about 2/3 watt of power because of the switching.
Ultimately, it's a tradeoff between how efficient you want the circuit to be and how much effort you want to put into optimizing it.
The BTS50055 is not good for fast PWM. If you look at the data sheet in particular "load switching capabilities and characteristics" on page 3 it tells you how fast the device can switch. Turn on time is somewhere in the 100us range typically and turn off might be about 60us. These numbers need to be 1% or less for decent efficiency and 100us represents 1% of 100Hz. If your switching speed is pretty low then use it.
How can I design a MOSFET H-bridge motor driver controlling only 1 PWM for a motor?
If I understand correctly you have a single PWM signal and you want to drive a H bridge with this signal. I'd start by looking for a couple of beafy N channel mosfets like the IRF1010 and then pick a topside/lowside mosfet driver like LTC4444. Feed PWM to the inputs via a couple of logic gates that create a deadband (so both FETs never switch on at once) and this gives you a half H bridge.
Repeat to make the other half but remember to invert the PWM signal. I'd look to be monitoring current on the dc side of things and forget about the BTS50055.
Best Answer
We can't say whether this will "work" because you haven't specified the desired operation, what controls parts like the two switches, where the tops of D2 and D3 are connected, etc. In short, this is a documentation mess.
There are also some obvious problems. There is nothing limiting current when Q3 is on, and Q9 is turned on by "PWM", just to name one.
Step back, create a proper spec for what you want a circuit to accomplish, how it will be controlled, etc, then maybe ask about details of various parts.