On-Line Open-Phase Fault Detection Method for Switched Reluctance Motors with Bus Current Measurement

Abstract

This article introduces an on-line fault diagnosis (FD) system to detect and recognize open-phase faults in switched reluctance motors (SRMs). Both tasks, detection and recognition, are based on functions built with the same information but from different sources. Specifically, these functions are constructed from bus current measurement provided by a sensor and from the estimate of such a current provided by an extended Kalman filter (EKF) that performs the estimation from only rotor angular position measurements. In short, the FD system only requires two measurements for employment: bus current and angular position. In order to show its efficacy, results from numerical simulations (performed in a virtual test bench) are presented. Specifically, these simulations involve the dynamics of the SRM, including the magnetic phenomena caused by the analyzed faults. The motor dynamics were obtained with finite element simulations, which guarantee results close to the actual ones.

Keywords

• switched reluctance motor (SRM)
• fault diagnosis
• finite element analysis (FEA)