Switched Reluctance Motor: Research Trends and Overview

There has been a growing interest in switched reluctance motor(SRM)ever since the development of thyristor in 1956.The most appealing feature of SRM which attracts researchers over these years is its simple structure that incorporates concentrated windings on the stator poles and plain laminations of ferromagnetic material as a rotor.Due to this attributes,advances are being made rapidly with the consideration that SRM can be used as an alternative to DC motors and permanent magnet motors.The objective of this paper is to present an overview of the recent developments and a prediction of possible future advancements in SR Drives.Brief history,importance,innovations in structure and control,along with practical application examples are all discussed here to give a more in-depth comprehension of the motor.

Torque Sharing Function Control of Switched Reluctance Machines with Reduced Current Sensors

This paper presents a Torque Sharing Function(TSF)control of Switched Reluctance Machines(SRMs)with different current sensor placements to reconstruct the phase currents.TSF requires precise phase current information to ensure accurate torque control.Two proposed methods with different chopping transistors or a new PWM implementation require four or two current sensors to replace the current sensors on each phase regardless of the phase number.For both approaches,the actual phase current can be easily extracted during the single phase conducting region.However,how to separate the incoming and outgoing phase current values during the commutation region is the difficult issue to deal with.In order to derive these two adjacent currents,the explanations and comparisons of two proposed methods are described.Their effectiveness is verified by experimental results on a four-phase 8/6 SRM.Finally,the approach with a new PWM implementation is selected,which requires only two current sensors for reducing the number of sensors.The control system can be more compact and cheaper.

Message from Editors

SWITCHED reluctance motor(SRM)is a doubly salient electric machine that relies on reluctance torque to rotate rather than electromagnetic torque,as implied on the name.The term switch comes from the fact that the motor depends heavily on power switches for its operation.This was the reason that slowed the development of SRM since micro and power electronics were not so advanced.

Suspending Control Scheme of 8/10 Bearingless SRM Based on Adaptive Fuzzy PID Controller

As a nonlinear,strong coupling and multi-variable system,the drive performance of bearingless switched reluctance motor(BLSRM)is always limited by its complicated electromagnetic properties.Generally,conventional PID methods are used to achieve the basic control requirement in wide industrial applications,however its inherent operating principle limits its use on suspending control of BLSRM.In this paper,the suspending force system,which is separately controlled from torque system,is built based on an adaptive fuzzy PID controller to limit the rotor eccentric displacement with proper generation of radial force.When compared with a system adopted using conventional PID method for suspending force control,the proposed adaptive fuzzy PID method has superior performance in shortening the response time,reducing the maximum eccentric displacement error and higher speed range of operation due to its online self-turning of controller parameters.Both in simulation and experimental cases,comparison of results of the above two methods validates the effectiveness of the adaptive fuzzy PID controller for BLSRM drive system.