A low-cost linear switched reluctance motor with integrated position sensor for general-purpose three-phase motor controller

This paper presents a novel linear switched reluctance motion system that can be driven by a general-purpose motor controller hardware. This is achieved by two methods: a low-cost position sensor is first integrated into the linear switched reluctance motor (LSRM) by making use of the unique open structure feature of the motor. The resolution of the position sensor is further enhanced via sine-cosine interpolation. The output of the proposed position sensor is a standard quadrature (A, B) signal for industrial encoder interfacing. Then with a proper reconfiguration of the three-phase motor windings and the insertion of three diodes, the LSRM can be driven by a standard three-phase bridge inverter with two current feedback sensors only. By combining the proposed low-cost position sensor and the novel driving scheme, the LSRM can directly replace any three-phase linear AC permanent magnet (PM) motors or linear AC induction motors without any hardware reconfiguration. This would increase the popularity of applying LSRM in motion control system