AC motors for application in a commercial electric vehicle: Designing aspects

Nowadays, electric vehicles are regarded as the future for a sustainable automobile industry. There are several electric motors designed for future integration in these vehicles, being the AC motors the most widely used nowadays. Among the AC motors group, the induction motors and the permanent magnet motors are the ones that have been most widely used. As a result, this study aimed at performing the design and simulation of these motors, in order to allow for their future integration in a commercial electric vehicle. In order to perform the design of alternative electric motors, a computational tool was built using the ©Matlab software. This tool allows performing the design of different motors (induction motor, axial flux permanent magnet brushless AC motor and permanent magnet cylindrical brushless AC motor, etc.), taking into account the inputs imposed by the user. In this paper, after designing an induction motor and a permanent magnet cylindrical brushless AC motor, simulations of these motors using the ©FEMM software were performed. These simulations aimed at studying the distribution of the magnetic field/flux density across the motors for typical working conditions (frequency and current). This study allowed to conclude that the permanent magnet brushless AC motor is the most attractive one for future application in electric vehicles, as it is characterized by a high torque, high efficiency and can be coupled to the rear wheels of the vehicles.