Directed Oil Flow Cooling of Disk Windings Using Graph Theory

Cooling calculations for disk coils with directed oil flow can be challenging because keeping track of the various paths and the associated path and nodal variables requires a fair amount of indexing. A simpler approach is to use graph theory to handle much of the tedious work required to obtain the matrix equations necessary to solve for oil pressures, oil velocities, disk temperatures, as well as oil temperatures and rises. Not only does this save on programming time and effort but the resulting code is much simpler and easier to follow. Once the physical relationships among the variables are established for representative cooling paths and nodes, the main task involves finding the appropriate graph and graph matrices to express the conservation principles necessary to extend these to cover all paths and nodes.