Detecting and Tolerating Faults in Switched Reluctance Motors

The switched reluctance motor (SRM) has inherently high level of fault tolerance. However despite of its high robustness and reliability it can face windings and bearings faults. The faults can cause costly downtimes in industrial environment, or they can bring about more severe consequences in safety critical applications. Therefore the detection of the faults in their incipient phase and the ability to tolerate them is a very important requirement for the electrical drive systems used in such applications. The paper deals with the most important faults of the SRMs, their effects on the machine performances and their detection. Also a reconfigurable fault tolerant control system for the SRMs is proposed, which is able to detect diverse winding faults and to mask these faults by imposing increased currents in the healthy remained coils of the machine. The fault detection capability and the correct reconfiguration of the proposed control system are proved by laboratory tests.