Predictive Maintenance Plan for Switched Reluctance Motor Drives

In a near future when Industry 4.0 is implanted, predictive maintenance will have a much more prominent role than that currently plays in traditional industry. Predictive maintenance is the organized monitoring with periodic or continuous measurement of variables of the state of the equipment to be maintained and its comparison with pre-established patterns for the determination of the instant in which the maintenance intervention should take place. Three-phase induction motor drives are one of the industrial equipment that has been given greater attention regarding predictive maintenance plans. In recent years, switched reluctance motor drives have begun to have some relevance in the industry. In this paper, after a brief review of the switched reluctance motors and their control, an analysis of the different types of faults and a description of the most usual diagnostic techniques in electric drives, a predictive maintenance plan for switched reluctance motor drives is proposed. This predictive maintenance plan considers different control strategies (hysteresis and single pulse), and is based on diagnostic techniques such as analysis of currents and spectral analysis of vibrations. Exhaustive experimental tests have been carried out in order to validate the proposed plan.