Single-sensor based low-cost current control in SRM drives for electric vehicle applications

Switched reluctance motor (SRM) drives are well-known for their fault tolerance and low-cost features. Nevertheless, the current sensors in an SRM drive, after power switches, take the largest portion of the overall cost and space requirement of the drive system. Therefore, in an effort to reduce the cost and size, and also improve the running reliability of the drive system, a simple current control scheme is presented in this paper. Closed-loop control of the drive system is achieved using a single current sensor in the lower dc-link by simply adjusting the reference current to maintain the current error within the pre-set limit in the commutation regions. Unlike the existing methods, no high-frequency signal or additional circuitries are used for the phase current reconstruction. The proposed method can also be implemented as a fault-tolerant control scheme for current sensors. The investigated technique is thoroughly verified by using a 12/8 SRM model in MATLAB/SIMULINK and obtained results well demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed current control scheme.

Mots clés

• current sensor
• current control
• Electric Vehicles
• fault-tolerant
• SRM drives