The prediction of torque pulsations in the salient-pole singly-salient reluctance motor

There has been a revival of interest recently in the singly-salient reluctance motor (SSRM), in the context of an electronically switched drive with rotor position feedback. The paper first describes the authors´ basic work led to such a machine with a surprisingly high torque capability and thermal rating. It goes on to describe how the machine optimised simply for output, suffers from serious torque ripple (even when fed with sinusoidal currents) due to the interaction between the rotor saliency and the stator slotting and stator MMF harmonics. The second section describes a computer model with particular reference to providing a rapid method of predicting the torque at many different rotor positions. The model is used to show the effect of varying the rotor geometry on the production of torque pulsations