An Exact Solution to the Modified Winding Function for Eccentric Permanent Magnet Synchronous Machines

The Winding Function Approach has been used since 1965 to describe the inductance behavior of small air-gap electrical machines, and several works have contributed to its formulation in the presence of mechanical faults, such as eccentricity, leading to the Modified Winding Function Approach (MWFA). In order to use the MWFA, an integral over a full rotation period needs to be computed. Nevertheless, this typically requires the performance of numerical integration, and thus it is affected by integration error, requires relatively high computational effort and, at the same time, it does not easily allow for performance of the analysis of the inductance harmonics. In this work, an exact analytical solution to the MWFA equation is provided in a form that allows to highlight the harmonic content of the inductances. After a thorough mathematical derivation of the solution, a numerical investigation is proposed for verification purposes.