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Purpose: Because of the shortage of energy, the development of green and reliable energy is particularly important. As a green and clean energy, wind power is widely used. As the core component of wind power generation, it is particularly important to choose generators with high reliability. Switched reluctance machine is widely used as generators because of its strong fault tolerance and high reliability. Therefore, this paper aims to propose a power converter and its control strategy to improve the efficiency of switched reluctance generators. Design/methodology/approach: In this paper, a full-bridge power converter (FBPC) instead of the asymmetric half-bridge power converter (AHBPC) is adopted to drive the switched reluctance generator (SRG) system. Compare the FBPC with the AHBPC, the FBPC has several advantages including low cost and modularization, and operation process of SRG winding current direction is variable. Findings: The results show that the SRG system can keep smooth operation by the FBPC with relatively high efficiency. Originality/value: The FBPC is suitable to drive the SRG system. Meanwhile, this paper introduces two excitation modes of the FBPC as three-phase three-beat mode and six-phase six-beat mode. When the six-phase six-beat control strategy is adopted, the dead band time of the converter can be avoided. At the same time, the SRG has higher efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]