A FINITE-ELEMENT SIMULATION OF AN ALTERNATOR CONNECTED TO A NONLINEAR EXTERNAL CIRCUIT

We consider a squirrel cage alternator (with laminated rotor and stator), connected to an external circuit whose components may be resistances, inductances, diodes, tension or current generators. The rotation speed of the rotor given, we compute the electromagnetic behavior of the system. The field approximation inside the alternator is achieved by finite element technique and the relative rotor movement with respect to the stator is taken into account using a rotation line (or slipping line) located in the air-gap. The external circuit is implemented in the model via an admittance matrix and in this way an integro-differential equation for vector potential A only is obtained. Numerical results have been compared with experimental measurements and found to be in good agreement with them. This work has been supported by VALEO. © 1990, IEEE. All rights reserved.