A New Control Method for Vibration and Noise Suppression in Switched Reluctance Machines

Due to their inherent advantages such as low cost, robustness and wide speed range, switched reluctance machines (SRMs) have attracted great attention in electrical vehicles. However, the vibration and noise problems of SRMs limit their application in the automotive industry because of the negative impact on driver and passengers’ comfort. In this paper, a new control method is proposed to improve the vibratory and acoustic behavior of SRMs. Two additional control blocks —direct force control (DFC) and reference current adapter (RCA)—are introduced to the conventional control method (average torque control (ATC)) of SRM. DFC is adopted to control the radial force in the teeth of the stator, since the dynamic of the radial force has a large impact on the vibratory performance. RCA is proposed to handle the trade-off between the DFC and ATC. It produces an auto-tuning current reference to update the reference current automatically depending on the control requirement. The effectiveness of the proposed control strategy is verified by experimental results under both steady and transient condition. The results show that the proposed method improves the acoustic performance of the SRM and maintains the dynamic response of it, which proves the potential of the proposed control strategy.