DESIGN AND PERFORMANCE OF A MICROCONTROLLER-BASED SWITCHED RELUCTANCE MOTOR DRIVE SYSTEM

ABSTRACT There is a growing interest in the use of switched reluctance motor (hereafter referred to as SRM) drive systems for various applications in diverse areas such as defense, home appliances, etc. Hence the design of a low cost controller for the SRM drive with high performance capabilities gains added significance. Microcontrollers (single chip computers) have emerged to fill this need in motion control. They provide both software control and flexibility in the reconfiguration of control algorithms. They also minimize the number of chips thus enhancing the system reliability at a low cost. This paper introduces a microcontroller-based controller for SRM drives with only an EPROM and two ICs for the logic access constituting the peripheral circuits. The entire control scheme including the pulse width modulator is implemented by software. A Siemens 80535 microcontroller chip has been chosen for this study.