The Brushless Doubly-Fed Machine shows commercial promise in certain applications requiring variable speed operation, such as a generator for a wind turbines or as variable speed pump drive. In order for this benefit to be realised the design of both the machine and the controller must be improved so that the machine can effectively compete with the existing technology. Before the machine and controller design can be considered a generalised model is required for the machine. In order to analyse the machine design a new generalised model is developed for a wide class of BDFMs. Through a coordinate transformation modes which are unobservable are identified and removed by exploiting the circulant properties of the component matrices. A model reduction technique is proposed for the most common sub-class of BDFMs. The validity of the resulting models are examined by experiment. Finally some preliminary results are presented on the application of feedback linerisation to the machine.
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