Passivity-based control of switched reluctance motors with nonlinear magnetic circuits

In this paper, the control of switched reluctance motors is approached from a passivity-based control perspective. The proposed controller solves the torque/speed/position tracking problem by exploiting the passivity properties of the machine. The methodology design considers the feedback decomposition of the motor model into one electrical and one mechanical passive systems and is divided into the following three steps: control of the electrical subsystem to achieve current tracking, definition of the desired current behavior to assure torque tracking, and design of a speed/position control loop. The main characteristics of the presented result are: it belongs to the class of control schemes that take into account the saturation effects present in stator windings and, regarding torque generation, it considers the use of sharing functions. The contribution of the paper is threefold: The controller design is developed using energy-dissipation ideas, the mathematical formalization of the current engineering practice of controlling this kind of machines with a cascade approach, and an extension to previously reported passivity-based controllers for electric machines in the sense that Blondel-Park transformability properties are not required.