Control aspects of brushless drives using switched reluctance motors

Brushless variable speed drives using switched reluctance motors (SRMs) have become popular relative to other drives and represent an economical alternative to PM brushless motors in many applications. The authors discuss these control aspects of the SRM power electronic converter drive. General control and converter considerations are first briefly reviewed. A prototype 3 kW SRM is used as the focus for the investigations, but the conclusions apply more generally. A mixture of theory, full nonlinear simulation and experiment was used and a selection of results is presented. During design a full simulation representation of the converter and the switching operations of its devices during may be needed but a simplified representation is shown to be adequate for control purposes