An Investigation into the Air Velocity Distribution Inside Switched Reluctance Motors.

The knowledge of air velocity inside all the air regions in any electric machine is essential in performing various air velocity-dependent analyses such as calculation of windage loss, thermal analysis, determination of effectiveness of cooling, and estimation of life of insulators. This article, in this context, introduces computational fluid dynamics (CFD) procedure for the evaluation of air velocity distribution inside electric machines. One of the today's most experimented machine, the switched reluctance motor (SRM), is considered for the illustration. A two-dimensional finite element approach (FEA) for CFD is described and results are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]