Finite Element Analysis of Laminar Heat Transfer within an Axial-Flux Permanent Magnet Machine

Abstract

Axial-Flux Permanent Magnet (AFPM) machines have gained popularity over the past few years due to their compact design. Their application can be found, for example, in the automotive and medical sectors. For typically considered materials, excessive heat can be generated, causing possible irreversible damage to the magnets, bonding, or other structural parts. In order to optimize cooling, knowledge of the flow and the consequent temperature distribution is required. This paper discusses the flow types and heat transfer present inside a typical AFPM machine. An Isogeometric Analysis (IGA) laminar-energy model is developed using the Nutils open-source Python package. The developed analysis tool is used to study the effects of various important design parameters, such as the air-inlet, the gap-length, and the rotation speed on the heat transfer in an AFPM machine. It is observed that the convective heat transfer at the stator core is negatively affected by adding an air-inlet. However, the heat dissipation of the entire stator improves as convective heat transfer occurs within the air-inlet.

High-order methods for thermal behavior of plate structures with internal heat sources

“…For example, the work published in Anders et al 12 investigated the IGA for evaluating the effect of thermal diffusion on a microstructure of a blend of polymers. The method coupled with a control volume approach has been applied to analyze the heat transfer in non-uniformly heated plates in Liu et al 13 The IGA has also been implemented to analyze the heat transfer in an axial-flux permanent magnet in Willems et al 14 Furthermore, the potential to integrate the IGA within a commercial framework is explored in Lai et al 15 Compared to previous works where only steady-state problems are considered, in this paper we aim to investigate the performance of the IGA for transient problems so that the full time history of the problem is considered. In the present study we develop an IGA approach that is capable of accurately approximating numerical solutions of the time-dependent heat conduction problem.…”