Vibration and acoustic noise reduction of switched reluctance motor with back electromotive force control

This paper proposes, as a control scheme of a switched reluctance motor, back electromotive force control (back-EMF control for the abbreviation) in order to reduce the vibration and the acoustic noise of a switched reluctance motor. In back-EMF control, the winding current is kept around the current reference without switching the power devices in a corresponding phase in the drive circuit by utilizing back electromotive force arisen in the stator windings. In this paper, the experiments were conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control. The experimental results in a 2 kW three-phase 12-8 poles switched reluctance motor show that the proposed back-EMF control scheme reduces the vibration and the acoustic noise while the efficiency increases compared with current hysteresis control (conventional control). From the experimental results, it is revealed that the proposed control scheme can suppress effectively the fundamental frequency component and its harmonic components of the acoustic noise compared with the conventional control.