Optimum Design Approach for Two-Phase Switched Reluctance Compressor Drive

This paper presents an optimum design approach for 2-phase switched reluctance motor (SRM) drives. The proposed drive is designed for compressor drives in a small-sized refrigerator as an alternative to existing brushless DC motor with rare-earth magnets. In the proposed approach, three GA loops work to optimize the lamination design as well as simultaneously fine-tuning the control parameters. To achieve the design optimization within an acceptable computation time, the repeated-calculation required to obtain fitness evaluation in the proposed approach does not use finite element analysis, but consists of a dynamic simulator based on an analytical expression of the magnetizing curves and a geometric flux tube-based nonlinear magnetic analysis developed specifically for this class of motors. The design results show the proposed approach can autonomously find a feasible design solution of SRM drive for the target application from huge search space. The experimental studies using a 2-phase 8/6 prototype manufactured in accordance with the optimized design parameters show the validity of the proposed design approach.