Excitation control and voltage regulation of switched reluctance generators above base speed operation

Switched reluctance (SR) generators are a candidate technology in vehicle electric power generation applications that require operation under harsh conditions such as high temperature and high speed. This paper presents the excitation control and DC link voltage regulator design for a SR generator system. Excitation control is designed with consideration of the machine electrical dynamics in single pulse mode of operation at different speeds, and dynamically locates the conduction period to a predefined region of the inductance profile for higher efficiency. This excitation controller is compared with a fixed turn-on angle and variable turn-off angle based excitation controller. The discrete nature of the SR generator excitation and per-stroke average DC link dynamics control issue is treated in discrete- time domain. The DC link voltage regulation is formulated as a multirate proportional integral (PI) control scheme. The proposed controller is validated and analyzed by means of a finite element (FE) model based dynamic simulation of a three phase SR generator.