Axial Flux Segmented SRM With a Higher Number of Rotor Segments for Electric Vehicles

Motors for in-wheel electric vehicle application should have high specific torque. In addition, these motors should be rugged, insensitive to vibration, and temperature variation. Therefore, segmented rotor switched reluctance motor (SSRM) could be an attractive alternative to permanent magnet-based motors, which are being used for this application. A limitation of SSRM is that it requires full pitch winding for its operation. Since, in-wheel motors have high diameter to axial length (D/L) ratio, SSRM of these dimensions would be bulky and has high copper loss due to full pitch winding. Hence, in this paper, a novel SSRM with nonoverlapping winding is proposed. This motor is an axial flux SSRM (AFSSRM) with toroidal winding arrangement. It has single-stator, dual-rotor configuration with 12 stator poles and 16 rotor segments on each rotor disc. Design procedure for AFSSRM is developed and a flowchart describing the design algorithm is presented. A finite element method-based simulation is carried out to verify the performance of the proposed AFSSRM. In order to validate the performance of the motor, a prototype is fabricated and experimental results are presented.