Switched reluctance motor (SRM) offers several advantages compared to conventional motors such as low cost, rugged design and good high-speed performance. Torque ripple and the associated acoustic noise and vibrations have been a challenge for its application in low and medium power applications. The torque ripple is due to double salient structure and nonlinear magnetic characteristics of the machine. This study presents a sense coil system to measure instantaneous inductance that represents the non-linearity and saturation effects. The current profile is generated from the measured inductance to minimise the torque ripple and reduce the copper losses. The speed of motor is derived from the measured inductance thereby eliminating need for an external sensor. The effect of temperature and asymmetries in machine construction are compensated due to the dynamic nature of inductance measurement. The proposed method is implemented on a SoC FPGA to control the speed of SRM with reduced torque ripple.

The advantages such as better fault‐tolerant capability, less space harmonic content, and requirement of power semiconductor devices with reduced voltage ratings etc., made the multi‐phase induction machines drives (IMD) best desirable for the high power applications. However, as the number of phase increases, the improvement in the LMR of the multi‐phase IMDs is not significant using the conventional SVPWM techniques provided in the literature. To address the above‐mentioned limitation, 18‐sided polygon (octadecagon) based voltage space vector generation for a nine‐phase IMD is proposed in this article without compromising in the torque harmonic profile. Using the proposed octadecagonal voltage space vector generation technique, the LMR of nine‐phase IMD is significantly improved by 26.03%, 24.28%, and 9.15% in comparison to the nine‐phase sinusoidal pulse width modulation, nine‐phase SVPWM and individual hexagonal SVPWM techniques, respectively. Efficacy of the proposed control technique is substantiated using the results obtained from ANSYS Maxwell simulation and experimentation on 5‐hp nine‐phase IMD prototype in the laboratory.