Trade-offs in Control of Switched Reluctance Motors (Avvägningar vid reglering av switchade reluktansmotorer)

Abstract: Soaring prices for rare earth metals have led to significantly increased production costs for permanent magnet motors. This has motivated research into alternative motor types, one of them, the switched reluctance motor (SRM), will be discussed in this thesis. The SRM has several positive and negative characteristics as well as highly nonlinear dynamics. It is not clear how trade-offs between these characteristics should be made in an optimal fashion when designing the motor hardware and control algorithm. An optimal control problem is formulated and the possibilities of using control to make trade-offs between torque ripple and efficiency is investigated. Based on the optimization results some possible improvements in SRM control are highlighted.