A new fault-tolerant switched reluctance motor with reliable fault detection capability

For reliable fault detection, often, search coils are used in many fault-tolerant drives. The search coils occupy extra slot space. They are normally open-circuited and are not used for torque production. This degrades the motor performance, increases the cost and manufacture complexity. A new Fault-Tolerant Switched Reluctance (FTSR) motor is proposed in this paper. A unique feature of this special design is that it allows use of the unexcited phase coils as search coils for fault detection. Therefore this new motor has all the advantages of using search coils for reliable fault detection while no extra search coil is actually needed. The motor itself is able to continue to work under any faulted conditions, providing fault-tolerant features. The working principle, performance evaluation of this motor will be demonstrated in this paper and Finite Element Analysis results are provided.