Loss Prediction and Thermal Analysis of Surface-Mounted Brushless AC PM Machines for Electric Vehicle Application Considering Driving Duty Cycle

This paper presents a computationally efficient loss prediction procedure and thermal analysis of surface-mounted brushless AC permanent magnet (PM) machine considering the UDDS driving duty cycle by using a lumped parameters' thermal model. The accurate prediction of loss and its variation with load are essential for thermal analysis. Employing finite element analysis (FEA) to determine loss at every load point would be computationally intensive. Here, the finite element analysis and/or experiment based computationally efficient winding copper and iron loss and permanent magnet (PM) power loss models are employed to calculate the electromagnetic loss at every operation point, respectively. Then, the lumped parameter thermal method is used to analyse the thermal behaviour of the driving PM machine. Experiments have been carried out to measure the temperature distribution in a motor prototype. The calculation and experiment results are compared and discussed.