Iranian Journal of Electrical and Electronic Engineering

This paper presents analysis and comparative study of a novel high-torque three-phase switched reluctance motor (SRM) with magnetically isolated stator segments. In the proposed SRM, each segment has a concentric winding located on the center body of it and two diametrically opposite windings which form the motor phase. There are four salient poles in the stator segment. Two of them share their flux path in the center body of the segment. The rotor has a solid structure including twenty two salient poles. In this unique SRM, stator segments topology, number of the stator segments poles and the rotor poles, and angular distance of the stator segments are selected so that the motor properly operates in both directions. Two-phase design with different pole combination is also possible. During operation, there are short flux paths along two adjacent rotor poles and excited segment poles. Therefore, the proposed SRM has all benefits of the short flux path structures. The principle and fundamentals of the proposed SRM design are detailed in the paper. The motor is analysed using finite element method (FEM) and some comparisons are reasonably carried out with other SRM configurations. Finally, a prototype motor is built and experimental results validate the performance predictions in the proposed motor.