Study of Different Arrangement of Magnets for the Purpose of Reducing Magnet Usage in Designing an Integrated Starter/Generator for Hybrid Vehicles

Due to the fluctuating price of rare earth raw material in recent years, the manufacturing cost for high performance motors used in electric or hybrid vehicles becomes very difficult to control. Therefore, the automotive industries have been actively performing research and development to reduce the dependence of the rare earth magnet. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of magnet arrangements at the same time to improve the magnetic circuit by increasing the reluctance torque while lowering the alignment torque in a permanent magnet synchronous motor. As a result, the amount of expensive NdFeB magnet is substantially reduced by adopting a V-shape arrangement.