Improved Analytical Method to Determine Flux-Linkage Characteristics of a Switched Reluctance Machine

This article proposes an improved analytical method for accurate evaluation of flux-linkage characteristics for a given switched reluctance machine (SRM). Initially, air-gap inductance is calculated using an approximated analytical method, which incorporates the effect of fringing fluxes. Then, precepts of a conventional method are used to compute these characteristics under saturation, with a proposed new analytical model for nonuniform flux distribution in stator and rotor poles. Finally, for error quantification, these characteristics are benchmarked against those from a standard finite element analysis (FEA) based software. Both mean and standard deviation of the estimation errors are presented to quantify estimation accuracy. To establish its general validity, these characteristics are evaluated using the proposed method for six SRMs of different geometries and compared with those obtained from FEA. For further benchmarking, speed-torque characteristics obtained from the proposed method and FEA are presented and compared. Finally, both flux-linkage and torque-speed data are experimentally obtained from a 5 kW, 270 V, 12 000 r/min, 6/4 SRM and presented for validating the accuracy of the proposed method.