Fault Resilient Strategies for Position Sensorless Methods of Switched Reluctance Motors Under Single and Multiphase Fault

Existing position sensorless methods rely on: 1) one-to-one correspondence between magnetic characteristics of switched reluctance motor (SRM) and rotor position; and 2) access to terminal quantities (i.e., voltage and current) for all phases. The occurrence of a fault in one or more phases will prohibit the necessary access to the phase/s and as such introduces a challenge to successful implementation of the existing position sensing techniques. This paper investigates the existing sensorless methods with the occurrence of phase faults and introduces a family of generalized strategies for sensorless operation of SRM under single and multiphase faults. The experimental results of a four-phase SRM drive with different numbers of faulty phases are presented to validate the proposed strategy.