Adaptive Feedforward Control Applied in Switched Reluctance Machines Drive Speed Control in Fault Situations

Many industrial and laboratory applications which make use of electric machines require noninterruption operation, even in the presence of faults, such as power generation and electric vehicles. Under fault scenarios, the performance of the system is expected to degrade and control techniques may be helpful to overcome this issue. Within this context, phase faults are obviously undesired, as may lead the machine to stop operating. Switched reluctance machines (SRM), due to its inherit characteristics, are naturally tolerant to phase faults, despite the loss of performance. Most of the techniques used to improve the performance of SRMs in fault situations are related to the switching feed converter. Regarding this issue, instead of presenting an alternative converter topology, this work alternatively proposes a control approach which significantly reduces the phase faults effects on the speed of the motor. Furthermore, the high-frequency noise is attenuated when compared to the classical proportional–integral (PI) controller, commonly applied to control such sort of motors. The proposed SRM-adaptive feedforward control (AFC) controller is able to recover the speed of operation faster than a classical approach, when a feedforward action is not taken into account.