Switched reluctance motor (SRM) drives conventionally use current control techniques at low speed and voltage control techniques at high speed. However, these conventional methods usually fail to restrain the torque ripple, which is normally associated with this type of machine. Compared with conventional three-phase SRMs, higher phase SRMs have the advantage of lower torque ripple: To further reduce their torque ripple, this paper presents a control method for torque ripple reduction in six-phase SRM drives. A constant instantaneous torque is obtained by regulating the rotational speed of the stator flux linkage. This torque control method is subsequently developed for a conventional converter and a proposed novel converter with fewer switching devices. Moreover, modeling and simulation of this six-phase SRM drive system has been conducted in detail and validated experimentally using a 4.0-kW six-phase SRM drive system. Test results demonstrate that the proposed torque control method has outstanding performance of restraining the torque ripple with both converters for the six-phase SRM, showing superior performance to the conventional control techniques.

A novel winding-coupled bidirectional dc/dc converter with zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) performance is proposed in this paper. In the low-voltage side, the parallel configuration is employed to share the large current and reduce the current ripple. In the high-voltage side, the series structure is adopted to sustain the high bus voltage and achieve large voltage ratio conversion. There are only two coupled inductors in the proposed interleaved bidirectional converter and their secondary windings are in series to serve as winding-coupled inductors. Furthermore, the two winding-coupled inductors can be integrated into a magnetic core to reduce the passive component numbers and improve the power density. Moreover, ZVS soft-switching operation is implemented for all the power switches to minimize the switching losses by introducing the active clamp scheme. In addition, the pulsewidth modulation plus phase-shift control strategy is employed to reduce the power MOSFET peak current and diminish the circulating losses. The duty cycle is applied to balance the voltages of both sides. The phase-shift angle is introduced to realize the power flow regulation. This decoupling control strategy is advantageous for bidirectional dc/dc conversion to realize high efficiency. Finally, a 1-kW prototype is built to verify the effectiveness of the proposed circuit.

Switched-mode power converters are inherently nonlinear and piecewise smooth systems that may exhibit a series of undesirable operations that can greatly reduce the converter's efficiency and lifetime. This paper presents a nonlinear analysis technique to investigate the influence of system parameters on the stability of interleaved boost converters. In this approach, Monodromy matrix that contains all the comprehensive information of converter parameters and control loop can be employed to fully reveal and understand the inherent nonlinear dynamics of interleaved boost converters, including the interaction effect of switching operation. Thereby not only the boundary conditions but also the relationship between stability margin and the parameters given can be intuitively studied by the eigenvalues of this matrix. Furthermore, by employing the knowledge gained from this analysis, a real-time cycle to cycle variable slope compensation method is proposed to guarantee a satisfactory performance of the converter with an extended range of stable operation. Outcomes show that systems can regain stability by applying the proposed method within a few time periods of switching cycles. The numerical and analytical results validate the theoretical analysis, and experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Vehicle platoon systems are widely recognized as key enablers to address mass‐transport. Vehicle‐to‐vehicle (V2V) and vehicle‐to‐infrastructure (V2I) are two technologies that drive platooning. The inter‐vehicle spacing and collaboration velocity in the platoon are important parameters that must be controlled. A new mass‐transport system called the Tracked Electric Vehicles (TEV) has been proposed which has reduced the inter‐vehicular spacing to only a quarter of the regular car length. This enables mass transport at uniform speed for cars with speed of 200km/h. However, conventional radar based adaptive cruise control (ACC) system fail to control each vehicle in these scenarios. Lately, sliding mode control (SMC) has been applied to control platoons with communication technology but with low speed and without delay. This paper proposes a novel SMC design for TEV using global dynamic information with the communication delay. Also, graph theory has been employed to investigate different V2V communication topology structures. To address issues of node vehicle stability and string stability, Lyapunov candidate function is chosen and developed. Additionally, this paper uses first‐order vehicle models with different acceleration/deceleration parameters for simulation validations under communication delay. The results show that this SMC has a significant tolerance ability and meets the design requirements of TEV.

This paper presents a novel converter topology for six-phase Switched Reluctance Motor (SRM) drives, which reduces the number of switches and diodes by half, compared with the conventional asymmetric half bridge converter, but needs no additional energy storage component. A dynamic model of a six-phase SRM is developed in the MATLAB/SIMULINK environment and conventional current chopping and angle position control techniques are applied to the proposed converter, demonstrating successful operation across the full speed range with modified conventional control techniques, lower converter losses and higher system efficiency compared with the asymmetric half bridge converter. Experimental tests comparing two versions of the proposed converter with an asymmetric half bridge are described and verify the predictions of the simulations.