A Comprehensive Characterization of Hollow Conductor Additively Manufactured Coils and Thermal Management System for a 250kW SPM Machine

This paper provides an extensive and comprehensive analysis on characterization of additively manufactured coils and heat pipe based liquid cooling thermal management system, for a 250 kW and 5,000 rpm machine. AC and DC electrical tests at 140 Arms and 70 ADC are conducted on AlSi10Mg additively manufactured coils to extract their thermal and electrical characteristics. Heat pipes and liquid cooling test setups are described and discussed. The thermal discussion is concluded by experimental results showing the effectiveness of the thermal management system proposed in this paper. FEA are performed on the coils using ANSYS Maxwell to accurately predict the losses at frequencies and current levels where the experimental setups face limitations. The FEA calibration process is successfully implemented to match experimental results resulting in a maximum error of 2.4%. Moreover, the FEA results are used to predict experimental losses for the coils at 1250 Hz which is beyond the experimental setup limits.