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DESIGN AND PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF SWITCHED RELUCTANCE MACHINES WITH HIGHER NUMBER OF ROTOR POLES FOR LOW POWER PROPULSION APPLICATIONS
Title
DESIGN AND PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF SWITCHED RELUCTANCE MACHINES WITH HIGHER NUMBER OF ROTOR POLES FOR LOW POWER PROPULSION APPLICATIONS
Creator
Ray, Aishwarya
Date
2013-04-30, 2013-05
Description
Currently most of the world along with the United States is based on a fossil fuel economy. The United States alone consumes around 25% of...
Show moreCurrently most of the world along with the United States is based on a fossil fuel economy. The United States alone consumes around 25% of global annual oil production. According to the Institute for Energy Research, around 70% of this oil is utilized for automotive applications [2]. Due to rising concerns over depleting fossil fuel reserves, global warming and other environmental concerns along with volatility in the fuel market, alternative sources of energy and fuel efficiency have received wide spread attention among researchers. Electric machines which are at the heart of any drive-train mechanism, have garnered particular attention. To date, a vast majority of research in this area has been focused on permanent magnet based machine topologies. However, due to concerns regarding rising demand and foreign dependence for the procurement of rare earth materials, coupled with rising costs and the environmentally hazardous excavation process of these materials, machine technologies with little or no permanent magnets have gained significant interest. Switched Reluctance Machines (SRMs) are one of the top contenders in this category. An SRM does not require permanent magnets, is extremely rugged and is well suited for harsh operating conditions. SRMs have a wide operating speed range, a very simple geometric structure and allow for fault tolerant operation. Conventional SRMs were designed to have a higher number of stator poles as compared to rotor poles. However, this configuration has many drawbacks such as high noise, torque ripple and complexity in modeling. Using the new formula developed at the Illinois Institute of Technology, a new SRM topology has been proposed which has higher number of rotor xii poles relative to stator poles (HRSRM). This topology has shown a significant improvement in torque ripple along with a reduction in noise as compared to conventional SRMs. This study evaluates the performance of an SRM with higher number of rotor poles for low power automotive applications like the electric bicycle (eBike), all-terrain vehicles (ATV), golf carts, utility task vehicles (UTV), etc. Using Finite Element Analysis (FEA), the machine has been designed with 6 stator and 10 rotor poles. This thesis presents preliminary results from the iterative machine design process along with detailed results from each stage of development. A closed loop simulation of the system has been carried out in MATLAB for verifying dynamic performance of the designed machine. Finally an experimental setup was developed for the prototype machine. The drive consists of an asymmetric bridge converter operating in closed current loop along with phase detection enabled via a position encoder. This test bed has been used to verify the feasibility of the proposed solution.
M.S. in Electrical Engineering, May 2013
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