Low Cost Switched Reluctance Motor Drives

Most advanced manufacturing processes require precise motions for material transfer, packing, assembly, and electrical wiring. To achieve precise motions, most of these high-performance manufacturing machines use X-Y sliding tables with permanent-magnet motrors. Though this method is most widely used, it has disadvantages of low accuracy, high cost, and low reliability.This thesis describes the position control of a switched reluctance motor for high-performance motions in manufacturing automation. The proposed actuator has very simple structure and it can be manufactured easily. There is no need for magnets and windings in the rotor. The actuator is extremely robust and can be used in a hostile environment.Because of the characteristic of the high nonlinearity of the motor, a novel control method, using the plug-in robust compensator and the torque linearization technique, is developed for precision position control of the actuator. Simulation and experiment results of the motion system indicate that the system has good performance.In this thesis, the following parts are included:(1) An effective switched reluctance motor model is offered, which can be used universally without complex changes for switched reluctance motors with different geometry dimensions.(2) The characteristic of the switched reluctance motor is highly nonlinear due to the complex electromagnetic circuit, and the torque generation has high torque ripple, so a novel two-stage torque linearization scheme is developed to perform the torque linearization.(3) The present literature on switched reluctance motor development seldom targets high-precision position control applications. However, position control is considered in this research. Firstly, the conventional PID control is employed. Secondly, a robust controller is designed, which is divided into two stages for the design, a 2DOF...