DIAGNOSIS OF ADVANCED FAULT TOLERANT

SWITCHED RELUCTANCE MACHINES

USED IN SAFETY AUTOMATED INDUSTRIAL SYSTEMS

Mircea RUBA1, Loránd SZABÓ1, Viktor FÜVESI2, Ernő KOVÁCS2

1
Department of Electrical Machines, Technical University of Cluj
RO-400750 Cluj, P.O. Box 358, Romania; e-mail: Mircea.Ruba@mae.utcluj.ro
2
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Miskolc
H-3515 Miskolc-Egyetemváros, Hungary; e-mail: elkke@gold.uni-miskolc.hu

ABSTRACT

Industrial systems are in a process of continuous expansion in means of

increased safety and fault free operation. More and more high tech automated
equipments are included in systems to supervise, control and offer best quality of
the final product of the process. In addition sensors and traducers are placed along
the process line, coupled with fault tolerant components. These are usually
electromechanical actuators with built in motion controlled electrical machines. The
paper’s aim is to present the development, testing and analysis of a fault tolerant
switched reluctance machine, which can be used in automated systems that demand
high operating skills even in case of electrical defects. Different fault scenarios are
studied to prove that the proposed machine will meet the system’s demand. To be
able to set up a good simulation environment, two software were coupled,
MATLAB/Simulink and Cedrat's Flux2D, allowing to perform both analytical and
FEM computations.

INTRODUCTION

The concept of fault tolerance emerged in the field of information technology

because of the demand of safety and reliability of a system. Later on more and more
fields of engineering took over the concept, and the connection between fault
tolerant equipments formed fault tolerant systems [1]. The word system can have
multiple meanings, regarding the environment that is included in. Usually, a system
can be considered as a network that couples different hardware or software
components, all achieving the same goal, the good operation of the process. As the
number of components rise, the possibility of fault occurrence is higher. Usually, a
system is divided in stages, each with an appropriate responsibility in the global
process. Fault occurrence can be seen similar to a computer virus, which can spread
from a component to other, from the same or from different stages.
Thus, in general, the result of the fault tree synthesis process is a network of
interconnected fault trees which record logical relationships between component
and system failures.
The top events of these fault trees represent system failures. Leaf nodes
represent component failure modes while the body of intermediate events (and
intervening logic) records the propagation of failure in the system and the
progressive transformation of component malfunctions to system failures.
The malfunction of the actuator will provide a total control loss of the process
and full system shut down will be required. If the actuator is built in the manner of
being able to operate in faulty conditions, it will be a fault tolerant one. As financial
issues must be considered, especially in building series of industrial equipments,
low cost and high efficiency actuators are needed. In this paper such a fault tolerant
switched reluctance machine (SRM) will be presented.
The electrical machine is studied by means of simulation. The model was built
using specific software packages. One, Flux 2D, was used for modelling the
machine via finite element method (FEM). The second, MATLAB-Simulink
environment was applied for modelling the inverter's control system and to generate
the faults for the studied cases. These two programs were coupled and worked
together using the Flux-to-Simulink Technology. That rate it was possible to study
in details all the typical faulty states of the motor [3].

THE PROPOSED SRM STRUCTURE

Achieving a fault tolerant variant of a usual electrical machine requires modified

topologies. While developing efficient fault tolerant electrical machines it is
important to take into account also its losses. The main idea was to shorten the flux
paths in the motor, hence the shorter flux paths means lower iron losses [3] (Fig. 1).
Upon this criterion a 12/14 structure was designed.

Fig. 1. Proposed fault tolerant SRM

The machine has six phases, and each of them is divided into two separate fed
and commanded channels. Hence the power converter of the machine has 12
H-bridge branches, as it is shown in Fig. 2. This way, in case of an open or short
circuit of a channel, the converter isolates by its command the faulty zone and
operates the rest of channels to cover the loss provided by the defect. As each phase
is divided into two channels, if one channel is shut down due to a fault, the second
one will still operate and contribute to the torque generation. Hence, continuous
operation despite faults is achieved by the joint of special SRM structure and the
complex converter.
 Fig. 2. The proposed power converter

POSSIBLE FAULTS OF THE SRM AND THEIR DETECTION

The block diagram of a SRM’s control system, with fault detector and current
correction feedback is given in Fig. 3.

Fig. 3. Block diagram of a SRM drive system

Several components may become faulty: the converter, the machine or the
control circuits [4]. The paper is dealing mainly with the failures that can occur in
the electrical machine. Early studies already gathered information about the faults
that can appear in a SRM [5], [6]. The faults taken into account are: turn to turn, or
phase to phase short circuits, etc. Other issues are the open circuits due to
mechanical damage of the wiring or corrosion of the junctions.
Detection of fault is an extremely important problem and also a critical one. The
lack of the full channel current is simple to detect. The problem is the detection of
small changes in the machine’s behaviour. Two detection methods are mainly used.
Firstly an overcurrent detector can be applied, using the sensed current signal,
setting a comparator having a threshold above the normal operating range of the
phase currents (Fig. 4.a).

a) Current differential detector b) Flux differential detector

Fig. 4. Fault detection methods
 The second one, the flux differential detector (Fig. 4.b) uses search coils
wrapped around the stator poles. When a fault occurs the imbalance in the pole
fluxes induces a voltage in one search coil that is greater than the voltage in the
other coil, producing a net voltage that can be detected with a bidirectional
comparator [7].

THE COUPLED SIMULATION PROGRAM

As already mentioned, the best solution to provide correct and considerable

results to emphasize the behaviour of the machine both in normal and faulty
operation is to use coupled software simulation (Fig. 5).

Fig. 5. The Simulink application for the command stage

Matlab/Simulink offers the possibility to embed the Flux2D FEM simulation
program for synchronous computation of the electronic converter linked to the FEM
model of the SRM. Each phase of the converter is driven by a module that computes
the turn ON/OFF angles for the power switches, regarding the rotor position, speed,
and imposed current value. These signals are sent to Flux2D via the
Flux-To-Simulink Coupling Module. One time step is computed and feedback
signals (the rotor position, currents and speed) are sent back through the same
module to Simulink in order to compute the next set of commands for the power
switches.

RESULTS OF THE SIMULATION

To study the machine’s operation in faulty regime, different scenarios had to be

set up. All these are compared with the normal operating mode (Fig 6a), considered
reference. The studied faults are: an open channel (Fig 6b), one open phase (Fig 6c),
double channel opened (Fig 6d) and a phase and a channel opened (Fig 6e). The
reference torque is considered to be around 20 Nm.
 50

Current [A]
0

-50
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
t [s] -3
x 10
50

Torque [Nm]
0

-50
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
t [s] -3
x 10 a)
50
Current [A]

-50
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
t [s] -3
x 10
50
Torque [Nm]

-50
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
t [s] -3
x 10 b)
50
Current [A]

-50
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
t [s] -3
x 10
50
Torque [Nm]

-50
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
t [s]
x 10
-3
c)
50
Current [A]

-50
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
t [s] -3
x 10
50
Torque [Nm]

-50
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
t [s]
x 10
-3
d)
50
Current [A]

-50
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
t [s] -3
x 10
50
Torque [Nm]

-50
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
t [s]
x 10
-3
e)
Fig. 7. Results of simulations. Currents and torque vs. time at different
healthy and faulty regimes
By analytical calculations, increased current values can be set to establish in all
cases the mean torque equal with the reference value. The ripples are naturally
increased because the lack of current in the damaged channel/phase. Although a
single channel is opened, the most probably faulty case, practically the SRM will
develop at unchanged currents near the same mean torque as in the case of the
healthy machine. The single effect of the fault is in the increase of the torque
ripples, but by less than 4 Nm. If two channels of different phases are opened the
currents must be increased by 10% to achieve the rated mean torque. If an entire
phase is opened the current has to be increased by over 30% to achieve the rated
mean torque, and the torque ripples in this case are greater by 2.5 times. The
proposed fault tolerant SRM is able to develop near its rated mean torque also in the
worst case in study. In this case the phase current must be increased by 1.5 times.
The torque ripples are not much greater as in the case of a single open phase.

CONCLUSIONS

It was proved by simulations that the proposed fault tolerant SRM and its
converter both offer a high level of tolerance to defects. This property added to its
low manufacturing costs provides a considerable reason to be used as industrial
actuator where safety is critical. Future work will include the increase of both stator
and rotor poles, of the number of phases and channels in order to raise the tolerance
level of the drive system.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The work was possible due to the support given by the Romanian Ministry of
Education and Research, National Authority for Scientific Research (ANCŞ) and
the Hungarian National Office for Research and Technology (NKTH) in the
framework of the "Romanian-Hungarian Intergovernmental S & T Cooperation
Programme for 2008-2009". The authors should like to sincerely thank this way for
the financial support.

REFERENCES

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