Precise Electrical Machine Stator Winding Modeling for Thermal Analysis of Efficient Cooling Concepts

The current development of electric and hybrid electric vehicles has drawn more attention toward the development of electrical machines with high power densities. Though highly efficient, these machines heat up significantly during operation. By design, state-of-the-art water jacket cooling concepts remove the heat mainly through high internal thermal resistances of the electrical machine. The resulting maximum temperatures in the end winding region limit the achievable machine power output. In this study, alternative cooling concepts are presented, which efficiently use the existing heat conduction paths of an electric machine. For this purpose, two modeling methods for the stator windings were developed: a high-resolution approach that considers each individual wire and an abstract approach that uses zones of constant anisotropic thermal conductivity to specify the heat flow in the windings. Both models were used in conjugate heat transfer simulations of a long-term thermal test of the electrical machine integrated in the BMW i3. For both models the validation showed a very good agreement of simulated and measured temperatures. An evaluation of both methods showed the abstract approach to be more efficient than other simulation methods used in the current R&D. Its application for alternative cooling concepts revealed the necessary heat transfer coefficients at different fluid temperatures for a sole convective cooling of the end windings. However, it could be found that a homogeneous temperature distribution in the stator of the machine can only be achieved if a combination of water jacket cooling and convective end winding cooling is used.