Design and Development of a High Efficiency Switched Reluctance Motor for a Mixer-Grinder Application

This paper presents the design and development of a high efficiency 3-phase, 6/4 switched reluctance motor (SRM) for driving a 280 W mixer-grinder. The conventional motor being used for this application so far is a universal motor and because of its inherent drawbacks such as the requirement of a mechanical commutator with brushes, and absence of easy controllability, the efficiency never exceeds 70%. As per the test results reported in this paper, the designed SRM instead delivers the same power at the rated speed of 10000 rpm with much higher efficiency of 86%, with several other advantages like low noise, programmable speed resulting in smooth mixing/grinding along with low power consumption. The conventional design of the SRM and its verification and tuning using 2-D finite element analysis, the effect of bleeder capacitor on the drain source voltage appearing across the devices, chopping mode control for limiting the current peaks and also the test results on the developed mixer grinder are discussed in detail.