AN EFFICIENT DRIVE CIRCUIT FOR SWITCHED RELUCTANCE MOTOR

The purpose of this paper is to present an efficient converter circuit used to drive switched reluctance motors. It uses the C-dump topology in which the trapped energy in the phase windings is returned to the supply capacitor to be used in the following strokes. In addition to the C-dump topology, it uses two extra feedbacks. One comes from a governor mounted on the shaft of motor which controls the proper advancement of the firing time for each power transistor in different speeds, and the other, gets pulses from the shaft sensors in order to keep the motor speed constant under different loads. A Spice simulation has been performed on the drive circuit to see the current waveforms under different firing time advancements. Finally the test results of the converter circuit driving an isolated phase reluctance motor are presented.