Optimal Design Solutions for Permanent Magnet Synchronous Machines

This paper presents optimal design solutions for reducing the cogging torque of permanent magnets synchronous machines. A first solution proposed in the paper consists in using closed stator slots that determines a nearly isotropic magnetic structure of the stator core, reducing the mutual attraction between permanent magnets and the slotted armature. To avoid complications in the windings manufacture technology the stator slots are closed using wedges made of soft magnetic composite materials. The second solution consists in properly choosing the combination of pole number and stator slots number that typically leads to a winding with fractional number of slots/pole/phase. The proposed measures for cogging torque reduction are analyzed by means of 2D/3D finite element models developed using the professional Flux software package. Numerical results are discussed and compared with experimental ones obtained by testing a PMSM prototype.