Starting of three-phase reluctance motor fed from a single phase supply using chopper drive

This paper presents a technique for starting a three-phase reluctance motor fed from a single-phase supply under low frequency supply. This technique based on chopping the waveforms of supply voltage to achieve the desired frequency. The chopper drive consists of two switches, one for chopped the supply voltage waveform and the other for discharged the storage energy of the motor. The motor can runs with low frequency supply due to the super harmonics accompanied with the supply division which increase the steepness of the average torque-slip curve near the synchronous speed. The feasibility of the principle of operation of the chopper drive and the validity of the theoretical results has been verified experimentally.