On-line Detection and Mitigation of Faulty Position-signal for Switched Reluctance Motors

Rotor position information is crucial for normal operation of a Switched Reluctance Motor (SRM). Generally, optical-interrupters based position sensor is widely used as it is cost effective. Due to misalignment however, these often cause faulty position signals with undesired phase-shifts. This leads to the generation of switching signals with unequal duty-ratio which causes unbalanced excitation of phases. Therefore, this paper proposes an online method which, initially, detects the fault and quantifies undesired phase-shifts among the position signals obtained from optical-interrupters. Subsequently, it synthesizes corrected position signals with desired phase-shifts. Finally, simulation results are presented to validate the proposed online-method.