Reliability Assessment of the Switched Reluctance Motor Drive Under Single Switch Chopping Strategy

In this paper, a detailed set of reliability prediction methodology for switched reluctance motor drive (SRD) considering system specific control strategy and component fault classification is elaborated from component level to system level. At component level, introduction to SRD and its single switch chopping strategy is presented to capture characteristics of SRD reliability under a certain control strategy. The unique fault modes classification and summary methods which are tailored to SRD are applied for identification of system dominant fault modes. Then at system level, binary models (reliability block diagram and part-count model) and multivariate model (Markov model) are adopted to build systematic SRD reliability model, respectively. Especially in the Markov model, state transition diagram and state probability matrix P(t) are built in detailed description to constitute the graphical and numerical Markov reliability model. Conclusions can be drawn that compared with RBD, Markov model can capture the effect of specific control strategy on system reliability, and further demonstrates the stronger consistency with SRD practical operation. Fault simulation and experiments are conducted to illustrate the influence on system operation state caused by a control strategy. Also, the results verify the state assessment of system performance after component-level fault occurs.