Switched Reluctance Motor
- The reluctance motor is an electric motor in which torque is produced by the tendency of its moveable part to move to a position where the inductance of the excited winding is maximized. The origin of the reluctance motor can be traced back to 1842, but the reinvention‖ has been possibly due to the advent of inexpensive, high-power switching devices.
- The reluctance motor is a type of synchronous machine. It has wound field coils of a DC motor for its stator windings and has no coils or magnets on its rotor. Fig.shows its typical structure. It can be seen that both the stator and rotor have salient poles; hence, the machine is a doubly salient machine.
- The rotor is aligned whenever the diametrically opposite stator poles are excited. In a magnetic circuit, the rotating part prefers to come to the minimum reluctance position at the instance of excitation. While two rotor poles are aligned to the two stator poles, another set of rotor poles is out of alignment with respect to a different set of stator poles. Then, this set of stator poles is excited to bring the rotor poles into alignment.
