Challenges in the Electromagnetic Design of Multiphase Machines: Winding and Equivalent Circuit Parameters

Abstract

The usage of multiphase electrical drives expands the operation possibilities of electrical machines and opens new directions of research on inverter-fed electrical machines. With an increasing number of phases, the standard approach of the electromagnetic design of machines has to be generalized to m-phase systems, which is not usually respected in the literature focused on electric machine design, and it is rarely published. This paper summarizes the specific problems linked with the design of machines with different numbers of phases, focusing on the winding design and the calculation of equivalent circuit parameters. In addition to the direct effect of different numbers of phases, the impact of injecting higher order time harmonic components on the electromagnetic design of electric machines is analyzed. The obtained analytical results are verified by the measurement of a nine-phase experimental induction motor.

Investigation of Open Circuit DC Winding Induced Voltage Reduction Techniques in Five Phase Non-Overlapped Wound Field Flux Switching Machines

“…However, multi-phase machines also suffer from some drawbacks such as complex control circuitry and enhanced number of power components. The merits and demerits of the multiphase machines [28][29] are summarized in Table I. Previously, the studies on multi-phase machines investigated the conventional PM synchronous machines and induction machines, with a particular focus on the derive aspect [30][31].…”

A Comprehensive Survey on Fault Tolerance in Multiphase AC Drives, Part 1: General Overview Considering Multiple Fault Types

“…A few of them tackle the subject of multiphase drives with very ample scope [1,2,[29][30][31][32][33], providing comprehensive summaries of a wide range of aspects related to these systems: advantages, applications, modeling, harmonic mapping, control methods, fault tolerance, space-vector (SV) pulsewidth modulation (PWM), multimotor drives, etc. On the other hand, some of the existing survey papers about multiphase drives are focused on specific aspects, such as six-phase induction machines (IMs) with asymmetrical winding spatial arrangement (WSA) [42], SV PWM for five and six phases [44], integrated on-board battery chargers for electric automotive vehicles [16], traction motor drives [3,48], aircraft applications [52,53], electrical transportation (in general) [49][50][51], drives based on multiple three-phase modules [43], advanced converter topologies (matrix, multilevel, open-end windings) [4,46,52], wind-energy [54], fault tolerance and wind/stand-alone generation [24], fault-tolerant multilevel drives [47], power sharing between multiple three-phase winding sets [37], exploitation of additional DOFs [4,35,36], machine design [34,55], healthy-drive control [34], direct torque control (DTC) [38], model predictive control (MPC) [39][40][41], or fault-tolerant control for five-phase machines using reduced-order transformation matrices [45].…”

Winding Design and Efficiency Analysis of a Nine-Phase Induction Machine from a Three-Phase Induction Machine

“…Meanwhile, ref. [14] describes an approach to design a six-phase motor, and in [15], specific problems related to the design of motors with a different number of phases are summarized, and results of the analysis are verified experimentally on a nine-phase asynchronous motor test bench. In ref.…”