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Thanks to the absence of rotor windings and permanent magnets, switched reluctance motors have a small weight construction. The integration of a modular power converter in a switched reluctance motor leads to a highly compact and fault-tolerant motor drive with small weight and high power density. In this article, a polygon-retrofitted integration topology is proposed for switched reluctance motors. Both the switched reluctance motor and the power converter are cooled with one shared cooling circuit. The power converter is designed and implemented using silicon carbide technology for its low losses and small thermal resistance. The proposed integration topology is extensively studied using multiphysics modeling and experimental measurements on a fully integrated rotating setup. A highly compact and power dense drive of 3.1 kW/L is obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, a circumscribing polygon integrated modular motor drive topology with shared cooling for the power converter and the electrical machine is proposed and benchmarked with the nonintegrated version. The proposed topology is applied on an axial flux permanent magnet synchronous machine. The topology is capable of mechanically mounting the power converter, sufficiently cooling both the power converter and the electrical machine, and combining both of them into the same housing. The mechanical and the thermal design are done to ensure thermal decoupling between the power converter and the motor winding, and to provide a low thermal resistance from the power converter and the electrical machine to the ambient. Due to the limited space available for the power converter module, wide bandgap semiconductor technology is chosen for the implementation of the converter module, thanks to their small package size and low power losses. A highly modular, integrated, and compact drive is achieved compared to the nonintegrated one. A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model is developed for one module of the proposed integrated drive to evaluate the maximum current that can be injected by one converter module without exceeding the junction temperature limit of the switches and the maximum winding temperature. An experimental setup is built to validate the results of the introduced multiphysics models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To find the temperature rise for high power density yokeless and segmented armature (YASA) axial flux permanent magnet synchronous (AFPMSM) machines quickly and accurately, a 3D lumped parameter thermal model is developed and validated experimentally and by finite element (FE) simulations on a 4 kW YASA machine. Additionally, to get insight in the thermal transient response of the machine, the model accounts for the thermal capacitance of different machine components. The model considers the stator, bearing, and windage losses, as well as eddy current losses in the magnets on the rotors. The new contribution of this work is that the thermal model takes cooling via air channels between the magnets on the rotor discs into account. The model is parametrized with respect to the permanent magnet (PM) angle ratio, the PM thickness ratio, the air gap length, and the rotor speed. The effect of the channels is incorporated via convection equations based on many computational fluid dynamics (CFD) computations. The model accuracy is validated at different values of parameters by FE simulations in both transient and steady state. The model takes less than 1 s to solve for the temperature distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]