Performance Analysis of the Outer Rotor Variable Reluctance Resolver

Position sensors are essential in the control of moving systems. Variable Reluctance (VR) resolvers are used as position sensors in the control of permanent magnet motors due to their simple and robust structure. VR resolvers can be built in outer/inner stator configuration. Although most of the commercial VR resolvers have outer stator /inner rotor configuration, the manufacturing process of the inner stator resolver is much simpler than that of outer stator ones. However, design considerations of inner stator/outer rotor configurations are not well established. Therefore, in this paper the influence of different number of stator slots, pole number of windings, and number of rotor saliency on sensor’s accuracy is discussed. Time stepping finite element method using ANSYS software is used for design and MATLAB is used for error and harmonic calculation.