Alternative Procedures for Thermal Design on Electric Machine

Abstract

A modern and widely used tool for thermal analysis in the electric motor design is computational fluid dynamics CFD which is a robust tool for these studies but is computationally expensive. Therefore, two alternative approaches are studied in this work, a lumped parameter thermal network and a thermal model based on the finite element method (FEM). First, an electromagnetic analysis is carried out since these results are the input values for the thermal models. Then, the thermal network is presented, and the FEM procedure is explained. The results indicate a good accuracy from the two models as they are compared to experimental temperature measurements.