Uncertainty analysis in the evaluation of PMSM end-winding inductance

This paper presents a comparison between several numerical and analytical methods used to evaluate the End-Winding Inductance (EWI) of three phase stator windings of induction or synchronous machines. A prototype of a Permanent Magnet Synchronous Machine (PMSM) is considered as a case study for the illustration of the computational and experimental approaches. The numerical simulations are carried out using two Finite Element Method (FEM) based professional software packages Flux and Comsol. This study proves that the errors generated by the classical analytical approach could be important due to the poor approximation of magnetic field lines distribution at the stator end-winding zone. It is also proved that the accurate evaluation of EWI in the analysis of PMSM becomes of paramount importance in case of short-length large-diameter PMSM. Experimental measurement results obtained on a PMSM prototype are compared against numerical ones.