Adaptive Firing Angles Control for Switched Reluctance Motor

The switched reluctance motor (SRM) has the simplest structure among the conventional motors due to its doubly salient poles structure and absence of windings and permanent magnets in the rotor. This simplicity and the magnetic saturation effect make the magnetic characteristics of the SRM a nonlinear function of rotor position and current magnitude, which leads to complicating its modeling and controller. This paper introduces a simple and cost-effective adaptive controller for optimum efficiency of SRM drive across a wide speeds range. An analytical approach is developed based on the nonlinear inductance profile of SRM to calculate the optimum switch-on angle online with consideration of back electromotive force. Moreover, the switch-off angle is optimized offline to minimize the torque ripple. The magnetic characteristics of tested 12/8 SRM obtained by the finite element method were used to build an accurate MATLAB/SIMULINK machine model. Several simulation results are carried out to verify the performance of the proposed controller at low and high-speed operations.