On the control of switched reluctance motors

In this paper, the control of switched reluctance motors is approached from a passivity-based control perspective. The proposed controller solves the torque/speed/position tracking problem by exploiting the passivity properties of the machine. The methodology design considers the feedback decomposition of the motor model into one electrical and one mechanical passive systems and is divided into the following three steps: control of the electrical sub-system to achieve current tracking, definition of the desired current behaviour to assure torque tracking and design of a speed/position control loop. The contribution of the paper is threefold: the controller design is developed using energy-dissipation ideas; the mathematical formalization of the current engineering practice of controlling this kind of machines with a cascade approach; and the establishment of an extension to previously reported passivity-based controllers for electric machines in the sense that in this case Blondel-Park transformability properties are not required.