Using Co-Simulations In Fault Tolerant Machine's Study

The Switched Reluctance Machine (SRM) is ideal for safety critical applications (aerospace, automotive, defense, medical, etc.) where it is desirable that the electrical drive system to be fault tolerant. During the design of a fault tolerant electrical drive system it is indispensable to use advanced simulation techniques. Finite elements method (FEM) based magnetic field computation programs are the most precise tools in simulating the electrical machines. These programs must be embedded in a general simulation platform. The paper deals with the analysis of a proposed SRM's fault tolerant capacity. The study was performed by means of a coupled simulation program. The main program was built up in Simulink, the most widely used dynamic system simulating platform. The SRM was modeled using the Flux 2D FEM based numerical field computation program. The machine's model was connected to the main program thru the Flux-to-Simulink link. This co-simulation technique proved to be a very useful tool in the fault tolerance study of the proposed SRM.