This paper presents a method to improve the efficiency of a standard asymmetric half-bridge converter for 3 phase, 12/8 switched reluctance motor (SRM) drives at low speed operation. At that speed range, the SRM converter operates mainly in current chopping modes either hard chopping or soft chopping control. This work emphasizes on minimizing the main power losses during the turn-off interval of each cycle. Once the optimum size of snubber capacitor is obtained from calculation, such snubber capacitors are paralleled with chopping switches in order to reduce rate of voltage rise across those switches and ultimately their switching losses can be decreased. The developed dynamic model based on measured data of flux linkage and static torque characteristics of the SRM has been used for simulation in MATLAB/Simulink environment. The results have satisfactorily verified the validity of the proposed concept.
