Design and analysis of an external-rotor switched reluctance machine for electric bicycle

With the good characteristics of simple maintenance, high starting torque and good efficiency at all speed, switched reluctance machines(SRM) has been a strong candidate for electric bicycles. This paper presents a design of the 3-phase,external-rotor SRM with 18 stator poles and 24 rotor poles (18/24) for electric bicycles application, and the external-rotor SRM is simulated by ANSYS with finite element analysis (FEA). The simulation gets the results of flux lines, the magnetic flux density, Torque-Angle curve, Inductance-Angle curve, steady-state current curve and the cost-effectiveness. What’s more, this paper designs an experimental platform for the externalrotor SRM, and validates the design by the results of steady-state current waveform and the start-up current waveform.