Samenvatting
Following the development of electric and hybrid vehicles over the last ten years, there is an increasing need of improving the performance of electric motors. Due to constraints in mass and volume, electric motors for automobiles have to reach very high levels of torque and power density. The best compactness is achieved with motors equipped with permanent magnets. However, permanent magnets are made of rare-earth materials which are costly and whose extraction is associated with relatively high greenhouse gas emissions. Alternatives without permanent magnets exist and the switched reluctance motor (SRM) is the most interesting one in terms of material costs and compactness.Therefore, the goal of this thesis is to design an SRM and to optimize it in order to maximize its torque density. Several SRM topologies exist, but previous research did not make a broad comparison of all the existing types. For this reason, such a comparison is made in this thesis in order to start the optimization with a promising topology.
Then, in this thesis, a design optimization was performed on several geometrical parameters of a 12/8 SRM. The first optimization step consisted in finding the optimum number of winding turns: 7, which was lower than that of the initial design and allowed the rotor diameter to be increased by 24.9 %. This resulted in an increase in average torque of 38.3 %. The next steps consisted in varying other geometrical dimensions and resulted in an average torque further improved by 2.4 %. This shows that increasing the rotor diameter is the most effective way to increase the torque from the initial design considered, and that the other parameters were already quite well dimensioned in this initial design.
| Datum prijs | 30 aug 2016 |
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| Originele taal | English |