A simulation method to predict the turn-to-turn voltage spikes in a PWM fed motor winding

This paper proposes a numerical simulation method dedicated to design assistance of high reliability machines fed by PWM inverters. It allows the computation of winding turn-to-turn maximum voltage stress for any combination of the wire positions in the stator slot. With such a tool, it is possible to design coils with the best wire arrangement for any fast-fronted pulses. An equivalent circuit is used to simulate the voltage distribution among the turns of the winding. A finite-element analysis simulation package is used to estimate the high-frequency distributed-circuit parameters of the winding. In order to validate the simulation results, they are compared with experimental results.