USE OF ELECTRIC MACHINE SCALING TECHNIQUES FOR MILITARY VEHICLE POWERTRAIN DESIGN

With the development of the next generation of military vehicles, the demand for significant amounts of electrical power is increasing, making the design of electrical machines, such as the vehicle alternator, integral to the powertrain design. This shows the importance of the machines’ size and efficiency, and the great influence they will have on the vehicle powertrain design process. In this paper, a finite-element-based scaling technique, capable of quickly generating torque-speed curves and efficiency maps for new machine designs, is improved to have two dimensional scaling factors instead of scaling the dimensions uniformly, thus increasing the flexibility of the tool. First, a magnetostatic finite-element-analysis (FEA) is conducted on a base machine, producing data such as torque, flux linkage, and demagnetizing field intensity in the permanent magnets, over a wide range of current magnitudes and phase angles. Then, based on the dimensional and winding scaling factors of the new design, the data is scaled to generate the corresponding torque-speed curves and efficiency maps through post-processing techniques. Finally, the applications of this technique are discussed.