An In-Phase Unit Slot-Opening Shift Method for Cogging Torque Reduction in Interior Permanent Magnet Machine

The cogging torque reduction methods in permanent magnet (PM) machines are more or less FEA trial and error-based and cause undesirable side effects, such as distorted back EMF, new harmonic components, and structure asymmetry. A slot-opening grouping method can address these issues. However, it needs to model all slots in FEA design validation during practical cogging torque optimization iterations, and also leads to back-EMF reduction. In this paper, a new grouping strategy, termed in-phase unit (IPU), is introduced, together with the slot-opening angle-shift method. The slot openings with the same cogging torque distribution pattern are grouped into an IPU, and the cogging torque peaks of the slot openings within an IPU can now be interleaved. Thereby, the major harmonic components of the cogging torque are cancelled out, instead of being summed up. The IPU grouping principle, the slot-opening shift angle computation, and the selection of the harmonic order to cancel are analyzed in detail. By comparison, the proposed method not only simplifies cogging torque optimization iterations by only modeling the slots in one IPU in FEA, but also compensates for the back-EMF constant reduction. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is validated by two typical interior PM machine design cases.