Control of a four-phase switched reluctance generator: experimental investigations

The paper presents basic operational characteristics of a 750 W 4-phase 8/6 switched reluctance generator (SRG) through experimental observation. A closed-loop control of the DC-bus voltage was successfully done using only phase currents as control parameters. In this method turn-on and turn-off angles were fixed, while each phase current was controlled by soft chopping techniques (PI plus PWM). The DC-bus voltage was constantly maintained at 100 V under various situations. A standard asymmetric half-bridge converter was chosen for this study. Meanwhile, the real-time control was implemented in DS1102 digital signal processor (DSP) environment. The experimental results have shown acceptable performance or this SRG control system in both normal and under-fault conditions. Optimal excitation angle control will be included in the future work to obtain improved performance and improved efficiency.