A novel high performance position sensorless control of switched reluctance motor drives

In this paper, a sliding mode observer is applied to eliminate the shaft position encoder of a switched reluctance motor (SRM) drive. The sliding mode observer estimates rotor position and velocity to control the speed of the motor by means of controlling the current level. The position and speed estimations are derived from a sliding mode observer that requires terminal measurements of phase voltages and currents. The proposed sliding mode observer has an important feature that the observer along with PI controller are highly robust to the errors in position and speed or change in load torque. The results show that position and speed sensorless observers can be reliably used for control of an SRM. Experimental results using a four phase, 8/6 SRM and the fixed-point digital signal processor (DSP) are presented