Rotor position information is essential in the operation of the switched reluctance motor(SRM) drive for generation the phase current switching signals. When an incremental encoder is used as a rotor position sensor, the initial rotor position can not be detected. Some sensorless rotor position estimation methods also have the same problem. In these systems, to initially align the rotor, the forced alignment method has a delay and reverse rotation before the motor can start. Therefore it can not be acceptable for unidirectional drive systems. So the forced alignment method is not desirable in all drive systems and the research on the SRM drives should be directed to a system without rotor alignment. In this paper, a new detection method of initial rotor position using the rate of change of current is suggested. Firstly, di/dt versus θR reference table, which is the relation between the rate of change of current and rotor position, is generated and then the squared Euclidean distance method is used to estimate the rotor position based on the table. The simulated and experimental results are presented demonstrating the feasibility and accuracy of this method.
