An investigation of the rotor-position-switched, current-fed, salient-pole singly-salient reluctance motor

The paper describes the re-evaluation of the traditional salient-pole, 3-phase, reluctance motor in the context of a modern electronically-switched variable speed drive. The motor uses the simplest possible rotor construction with single piece laminations and a standard induction motor stator. There is no squirrel cage. It is fed with sinusoidal currents from a voltage source inverter synchronised to rotor position. In contrast with received opinion, the motor is shown to be capable of a continuous rating somewhat greater than that of the corresponding inverter-fed induction motor. It does however suffer from significant torque pulsations, but these can be reduced by skewing the rotor to only 18% at the cost of only about 10% reduction in rated output