A novel spilt-winding fault-tolerant approach for a Switched Reluctance Motor

Reliability has become a mandatory feature in many safety critical applications, where major accidents, equipment damage or expensive downtimes must be prevented. One of the major qualities of the switched reluctance motor (SRM) is its high fault tolerance features. Although this motor can be able to continue operating even with some of its phases disabled, in this situation it appears an important torque ripple that could affect its proper functioning in some applications. This paper presents a novel low cost spilt-winding fault-tolerant approach, together with the correspondent power converter, that enables the motor to continue normal operation in the case of a winding open circuit. The obtained results show that the proposed solution, and its inherent fault tolerance behavior does not present a huge impact on the overall motor efficiency.