Study and Validation of a Contra-Rotating Dual Rotor Switched Reluctance Machine in Marine Propulsion

The aim of this paper is to present a dual rotor switched reluctance machine for marine propulsion systems with contra-rotating propellers. Unlike other dual mechanical port machines, the proposed machine has a single set of stator windings and hence only requires a single power electronic converter. The torque characteristic of the machine is derived as well as a load characteristic of a contrarotating propeller. A master-slave control scheme is proposed to ensure synchronism of the rotors. The feasibility of the machine is validated both by simulation and by experiment. The results demonstrate that the machine is able to operate under load unbalances and torque transients.