Experimental Sensorless Control of Switched Reluctance Motor for Electrical Powertrain System

In this paper a mechanical sensorless control of Switched Reluctance Motors (SRMs) scheme of an electric vehicle (EV) powertrain is presented. The aim is to develop a soft sensors implementation for position and speed measurements of SRM. This contribution is focused on an extended Kalman filter and a sliding mode observer. The proposed observers are designed to generate speed and position estimations with the purpose of achieving highly robust speed control. The performances of these two observers are assessed and their robustness are analyzed. The design also includes a robustness analysis of the proposed mechanical sensorless control scheme under conditions which take the parameter variations and the load torque into account. To carry out this work, experiments are highlighted on an experimental test bench of 8/6 Switched Reluctance Motor prototype.