Position Signal Faults Diagnosis and Control for Switched Reluctance Motor

An accurate rotor position signal is quite necessary for high-performance control of switched reluctance motor (SRM). In general, the position signal faults may lead to abnormal operation, which deteriorates the reliability of the switched reluctance drive system. Thus, it is quite vital but still a challenge to develop a control strategy that can diagnose and control the position signal faults in an autonomous way. In this paper, a square-wave position signal edge prediction-based control strategy is proposed for position signal faults diagnosis and position faults recovery. Integrated with the rotor position fault-tolerant control method, the SRM drive system can maintain reliable operation under different position signal fault conditions. In addition, a phase inductance slope-based sensorless control method is proposed for position fault-tolerant control under the extreme case with failure of all position signals. To verify the validation of the proposed methods, the experiments have been implemented in a 12/8 structure SRM prototype. The results show that the proposed control methods can further improve the fault-tolerant capability of the SRM system.