Unbalanced Phase Inductance Adaptable Rotor Position Sensorless Scheme for Switched Reluctance Motor

Factors such as machining precision and electrical failures may lead to phase inductance unbalance in a switched reluctance motor (SRM). Under unbalanced inductance conditions, most of the traditional sensorless schemes would be invalid if no modification is applied. To prove the existence of this problem, an inductance partition based rotor position estimation scheme under balanced and unbalanced inductance conditions are investigated and compared for identifying the position estimation error characteristics. The theoretical analysis shows that the position estimation error is highly dependent on the degree of the inductance unbalance. To maintain stable sensorless operation under unbalanced condition, a modified full-cycle inductance partition based rotor position estimation scheme with unbalanced inductance adaptive capability is proposed in this paper. In this method, the linear region of each phase full-cycle inductance is relocated with the predetermined inductance thresholds. By locating the linear inductance regions, the rotor position can be estimated from a simple partition linear model between the rotor position and the phase inductance. This method is easy for implementation without additional hardware and complex calculation. Experiments are performed on a 12/8 structure SRM and the results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.