F-MRAS based Speed Sensorless Vector Controlled Switched Reluctance Motor Drive

This paper discusses the unipolar excitation-based speed sensorless vector controlled SRM drive. The use of mechanical speed sensor or direct position or speed sensors is not a good practice because of the cost, reliability, compactness and environmental issues to name a few. Therefore, for speed control of SRM drive, we necessary require some estimation strategy which estimates the speed or position. Till now there is no speed estimator proposed in literature for a unipolar vector controlled SRM drive. In this paper, proposed "F-MRAS (Flux based Model Reference Adaptive System) based speed estimator" is used for estimating the speed for a unipolar vector controlled SRM drive. The speed estimator implemented for vector controlled SRM drive is simple, no look up table is required, and no external circuitry is required for injecting the pulses into the non-active phases as is required for injection-based speed estimators. The estimator is dependent on two machine parameters i.e; phase resistance and amplitude of a.c component of the phase inductance. Unlike the observer-based speed estimators which are dependent on many parameters of the machine. Hence, in this regard the used estimator in this paper is better alternative to observer-based speed estimators. The proposed estimator performs well in all the four quadrants of operation. The speed sensorless SRM drive has been extensively simulated in MATLAB/SIMULINK.