Vol.:(0123456789) 1 3 Electrical Engineering https://doi.org/10.1007/s00202-020-01203-3 ORIGINAL PAPER Stator resistance estimation for MRAS‑based speed sensorless vector‑controlled switched reluctance motor drive Yawer Abbas Khan 1  · Vimlesh Verma 1 Received: 16 April 2020 / Accepted: 18 December 2020 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE part of Springer Nature 2021 Abstract In this paper, unipolar excitation-based speed sensorless vector-controlled switched reluctance motor (SRM) drive is addressed. The use of position/speed sensors has few apprehensions in terms of price, dependability, compactness, especially from electric vehicle (EV) application view point. Therefore, for speed/torque control of SRM, it is mandatory to have some estimation technique which estimates the speed/position satisfactorily and with ease. In this paper, F-MRAS (fux-based model reference adaptive system) speed estimator is employed for estimating the speed/position. The reason for selection of this speed estimator is because of its simplicity, no large lookup table requirement and no external circuitry requirement for pulses injection. This estimator depends on stator resistance of the machine. Therefore, to make the speed estimator robust to stator resistance variations, on-line estimation of the resistance and its compensation is required. From this view point, a novel stator resistance estimator is proposed which estimates the resistance on-line. Further, this paper discusses in detail about the stability analysis of proposed resistance estimator and F-MRAS-based speed estimator. The speed estimator in combination with the proposed resistance estimator performs well in both motoring and regeneration modes. An exhaustive simulation of the drive has been carried out in MATLAB/SIMULINK. Also, the results are confrmed experimentally on a dSPACE-1104 platform. Keywords MRAS · Resistance estimator · Sensorless · SRM drive 1 Introduction Switched reluctance motor which is classifed as a premier member in the group of special electrical machines was ini- tially devoted for special applications. Now its application sphere is extending due to its numerous advantages over other machines. The concept of electrifcation in automotive industry has evolved in last few decades because of its urgent need from environmental perspective. From this view point, diferent motor drives have been tested in electric vehicles (EV). Of all drives, interior permanent magnet synchronous motor (IPMSM) drive has gained attention because of its superiority in EV. Now for EV applications, the switched reluctance motor has started replacing IPMSM because of no need for the rare earth magnetic materials. In addition, nearly fulflling the requirements of power/torque density and efciency [1]. SRM holds no rotor windings as a result of it very high-speed operation is possible [2–6]. The other advantages it holds are: its low cost, utilization of concentric windings, etc. [3]. So, to get all out of it, it is essential to overwhelm some of the shortcomings related with it. The acoustic noise with accompanying mechanical vibrations and requirement for rotor position sensing are the short- comings which need to be overwhelmed to accomplish high performance from it. Apart from it, speed/position sensors have many complications like being costly, less consist- ent, sensitive to environmental conditions and occupying more space which hinders its use in applications requiring compact system especially in EV applications [5]. From the results obtained by carrying failure mode and efect analy- sis for the electric drive used in EV’s, it is concluded that the speed/position sensor failure has catastrophic efects, for instance, on a busy highway. As far as functional safety standards are concerned, the fault tolerance to speed/posi- tion failure is mandatory. The fault tolerant drive allows the * Yawer Abbas Khan yawer.abbaskhan@gmail.com Vimlesh Verma vimlesh.verma@nitp.ac.in 1 Department of Electrical Engineering, National Institute of Technology Patna, Patna, India