Application of an adaptive PI controller for a switched reluctance motor drive

Nonlinear inductance profiles of switched reluctance motor (SRM) cause the complicated design of controllers, which leads to SRMs have not been widely applied in industries fileds. A traditional PI controller with fixed gain is easy to realize the control of SRMs. It can not provide good control performance over the whole range of speed regulation. To solve the problem, an adaptive PI controller of speed regulation, easy to achieve, is designed based on the characteristics of SRM in this paper. A first-order dynamic model in s domain is derived according to the simplified model of SRM. The relationship between PI parameters, average voltage and actual speed of the system is obtained based on the first-order dynamic model and then the adaptive adjustment of PI parameters is realized. The characteristics between traditional PI controller and adaptive PI controller have been compared by experiments, and results show that a better performance is achieved by adopting the adaptive PI controller. The system has rapid response with little overshoot, zero steady state error and high robustness to load torque disturbance.