Detection and discrimination of multiple faults in switched reluctance motor drives for safety-critical applications

Switched reluctance motors (SRMs) are being widely utilized in numerous safety-critical applications such as Electric Vehicle (EVs) and More/All Electric Aircrafts (MEA) etc., where the reliability of the drive system is critically important. An SRM drive system suffers from various failures during operation typically known as open- and short-circuit in power switches, open phase winding, and sensor faults. Extensive research has been done on the fault diagnosis of SRM drive system. Nevertheless, the existing techniques investigated each fragile component separately and proposed different approaches for each fault, which not only make the system complex, but also less reliable for practical implementation in safety-critical applications. Thus, a more sophisticated algorithm to detect and discriminate each of these faults in real-time becomes attractive. This paper presents a simple fault detection and isolation scheme for multiple faults in SRM drive systems. The investigated faults include open-switch, short-switch, open-phase and zero-output current sensors faults. The typical faults are effectively identified and discriminated through the digital analysis of the measured current by each phase current sensor and the dc-link sensor in real-time. The feasibility of the proposed scheme is verified by the extensive simulation results conducted on a three-phase 12/8 SRM drive system.

Mots clés

• Fault diagnosis
• fault tolerance
• SRM drives
• EVs and HE Vs