Fault tolerant control of adjustable speed switched reluctance motor drives

Existing position sensorless methods rely on (1) one-one correspondence between magnetic characteristics of SRM and rotor position and (2) access to terminal quantities (i.e. voltage and current) for all phases. The occurrence of a fault in one or more phases will prohibit the necessary access to the phase/s and as such introduces a challenge to successful implementation of existing position sensing technique. This paper introduces a generalized strategy for sensorless operation of SRM under single and multi-phase faults using existing sensorless method. Experimental results of a four phase SRM drive with different numbers of faulty phases are presented to validate the proposed methods.