Winding Configurations of a Switched Reluctance Generator System Excited by Circulating Current

Abstract

The winding configurations of a circulating current excited switched reluctance generator are investigated. This circulating current is generated in the 3-phase ring-connected windings by an external DC voltage source. With this DC-bias current, a standard diode rectifier can be used to build a DC power system based on the switched reluctance machine with only one set of stator-wound windings. Two topologies having different winding polarities, which are named the symmetric and asymmetric topologies, are comparatively studied in this paper. In the open-circuit conditions, the line voltages of two topologies are analyzed based on the characteristics of the circulating current excited generation system. Compared to the asymmetric topology, in the load conditions, the symmetric topology has a higher output power at the same copper loss, whereas it suffers a higher iron loss at the same output power. At last, the experiments are conducted to verify the analysis.