Designs and Performance Assessments of Permanent-magnet Motors for Personal Mobility-assistive Device Applications

With the approaches of aging society, the demands of proper personal mobility-assistive devices (MDs) for elderly people have been considerably increased in recent years. For the application concerns, three permanent-magnet (PM) motors, namely the surface-mounted PM motor, the Vernier motor, and the flux-switching motor will be designed to meet the operational objectives for providing the assistive motions of knee joint parts on the exoskeleton. Based on the objective operational and physical constraints of the specific MDs, with their distinct flux path design scenarios, optimizations of these PM motors will be provided along with their thoroughly performance assessments. From the emulated analyses of these PM motors at various standard testing conditions along with hardware experimental validations, it is confident that some potential motor structures for related mobility-assistive device applications can thus be provided.