Control strategies applied for reducing the vibration and torque ripple of a special Switched Reluctance Motor

Despite its robustness the Switched Reluctance Motors (SRMs) present some inconvenient drawbacks as a major torque ripple, vibration and acoustic noise when compared to other types of motors. These characteristics are usually related to factors such as the salient poles in the stator and in the rotor, the switched feeding and the control strategy imposed by the electronic converter. In this paper a Special Switched Reluctance Motor for fractional horsepower and high speed hand tool was studied in order to minimize its vibration and torque ripple characteristics. This task was accomplished by the development of a simple and flexible motor drive and the combination of two different commutations strategies: the Three Level Control and the Single Pulse with Overlapping Phase Current. The SRM prototype and its drive were constructed and submitted to several tests with the proposed commutation strategies. In the frequency domain the strategies results were considered satisfactory.