The mechanism and influence of the on-load terminal phase voltage distortion by armature reaction in interior permanent magnet (IPM) machines with fractional-slot concentrated windings (FSCW) are investigated in this paper, by taking a 12slot/8-pole machine as example. The phenomenon is presented firstly, which shows the peak voltage will be much higher than the fundamental value especially under flux weakening operation. Then, the mechanism is investigated with the aid of frozen permeability (FP) method. Due to the geometric feature of FSCW IPM rotor, the armature reaction flux will asymmetrically enhance the local magnetic saturation in tooth-tips and rotor lamination region near rotor ribs, which disrupt the smooth variation of phase flux linkage and lead to voltage distortion. With the increasing of current advancing angle (β), this effect will become more obvious and result in higher distortion level. Further, the influences of voltage distortion on the machine torque performance are investigated, which show it will only contribute to torque ripple in constant torque region, but will largely reduce the flux weakening operation region compared with the ideal one calculated by the fundamental voltages only. Finally, a prototype is manufactured and tested to validate the analyses.
Index Terms-Fractional-slot, interior permanent magnet, magnetic saturation, permanent magnet machine, voltage distortion.0018-9464 (c)