A Detailed Heat and Fluid Flow Analysis of an Internal Permanent Magnet Synchronous Machine by Means of Computational Fluid Dynamics

This paper presents a comprehensive computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model of a radial flux permanent magnet synchronous machine with interior magnets. In the CFD model, the water jacket cooling and a simplified model of the topology of the distributed stator winding are considered. The heat sources of the CFD model are determined from a finite-element analysis of the machine. The numerically determined temperature distributions of the machine are compared with measurement results from sensors located both in the stator and rotor. The particular focus of this paper is the analysis of the temperatures and the heat flow in the air gap and from the stator winding heads and the rotor to the inner air. Different operating conditions and two particular rotor designs with different inner air flow configurations are investigated. The potential of improving the thermal utilization of a rotor design with fan blades attached to the mounting plates of the rotor is shown.