Homogenization Technique for Axially Laminated Rotors of Synchronous Reluctance Machines

In this paper, we propose a homogenization technique to model the axially laminated rotor of synchronous reluctance machines. Thus, the computational effort can be significantly reduced by replacing the laminated parts of the rotor by some equivalent anisotropic media. The proposed method is validated in terms of flux density and electromagnetic torque. Some small discrepancies can be noticed due to the air-gap fluctuations caused by the steel sheets and the interlaminar insulation sheets of the rotor. With the test machine, the homogenization method reduces by the number of elements to one-fourth and the computation time to one-third.