Optimum Design Approach for a Two-Phase Switched Reluctance Compressor Drive

This paper presents an optimum design approach to a two-phase switched reluctance motor (SRM) drive. The proposed drive is designed for use as a compressor drive in a small refrigerator as an alternative to the existing brushless dc motor with rare-earth magnets. In the proposed approach, three genetic algorithm loops work to optimize the lamination design and to meet the requirements for the target application while simultaneously fine-tuning the control parameters. To achieve design optimization within a realistic timescale, the repeated calculation required to obtain fitness evaluation does not use finite-element analysis but instead consists of a dynamic simulator based on an analytical expression of magnetizing curves and a geometric flux-tube-based nonlinear magnetic analysis developed specifically for this class of motor. Design results show that the proposed approach can autonomously find a feasible design solution of an SRM drive for the target application from a huge search space. The experimental studies using a two-phase 8/6 prototype manufactured in accordance with the optimized design parameters show the validity of the proposed design approach.