A Practical Solution to Mitigate Vibrations in Industrial PM Motors Having Concentric Windings

Industry applications involving torque brushless dc motors require high efficiency over a large speed range. In order to achieve such specifications, flux weakening is necessary, which could lead to relative high electromagnetically induced vibrations and consequently to audible noises. Furthermore, in order to decrease cogging torque and to satisfy motor manufacturing constraints, concentric windings are usually considered. Such motor configurations lead to harmonics of the electromagnetic forces being the sources of mechanical vibrations. This paper focuses on the electromagnetic forces created in surface-mounted permanent magnet and internal permanent magnet motors for two concentric windings: one and two coil sides per slot. These forces are determined using both lumped magnetic scheme and two-dimensional finite-element (FE) simulations. Then, three-dimensional FE simulations enable to predict the mechanical modes and the acoustic radiated power. Finally, the authors propose a simple method to mitigate the magnetic forces and their variations. This method deals with skewing the stator. The skewing angle is optimized differently as in the usual case of decreasing the cogging torque. This method is really interesting for industry applications, because does not require any important change in the motor construction. The acoustic measurements confirm the analysis and the proposed improvement technique (stator skewing).