Solving the more difficult aspects of electric motor thermal analysis

With the ever increasing pressures on electric motor manufactures to develop smaller and more efficient electric motors, there is a trend to carry out more thermal analysis in parallel with the traditional electromagnetic design. It has been found that attention to the thermal design can be rewarded by major improvements in the overall performance. Technical papers published to date highlight a number of thermal design issues that an difficult to analyze. This paper reviews some of these difficult issues and gives advice on how to deal with them when developing algorithms for inclusion in design software.