Performance Analysis and Modeling of a Variable Reluctance Speed Sensor for Turbomachinery applications.

The speed sensor is one of the main components of the control and monitoring systems of rotational machines which is widely used in the aviation industry, railway, and automotive applications. Variable Reluctance Speed sensor (VRS) is a kind of magnetic sensor that has been traditionally employed for many different industrial measurements because of several well-known advantages, such as passive nature, non-contact operations, robustness, low cost, low sensitivity to dirt, and large-signal output. In this paper, a variable reluctance speed sensor is proposed. The design process of the proposed sensor is presented and both the magnetic and electrical models of this sensor are derived by assuming the effect of magnetomotive force caused by eddy current formed on the outer edge of the target gear at high frequencies. As a result, the proposed model can demonstrate the performance of the variable reluctance speed sensor at high frequencies very well. The proposed VRS is designed and simulated using MATLAB and Ansys Maxwell software to verify the theoretical results is constructed and tested. In this paper, a variable reluctance speed sensor is proposed and studied. The magnetic and electrical models of the proposed sensor are derived and the output voltage equation has been calculated as a function of the air gap length. The proposed VR sensor is simulated using 2D Finite Element Analysis software to identify the main parameters that influence the sensor output and also to verify the accuracy of the model. According to the simulation results, the output waveform quality will be affected by parameters such as air gap length, target gear material, the self-inductance of the VR sensor, and the load component values. In terms of the electrical model, we were able to simulate the effect of load resistance and capacitance on the sensor output.