Combined Magnetic-Equivalent-Circuit and Finite-Element modelling of Switched Reluctance Machines

Abstract

This paper focuses on the fast modelling of Switched Reluctance Machines (SRMs) through a combined Magnetic-Equivalent-Circuit (MEC) and Finite-Element (FE) approaches. The "easy" parts of the machine, in which the flux density is rather uniform, i.e. the stator and rotor yoke, and part of the stator and rotor poles, are modelled with reluctances, whereas the airgap flux and the local saturation of the pole cornes is considered with a reduced FE model in a preprocessing step. With this hybrid MEC-FE model, the characteristic flux-linkage curves can be obtained with good accuracy and low computation time, taking the full FE model as reference, and as demonstrated on an 8/6 SRM. The capability of the MEC-FE model to assess the influence of different machine parameters is also studied in this paper.