Thermal Identification, Model, and Experimental Validation of a Toroidally Wound Mover Linear-Switched Reluctance Machine

Thermal analysis is an important issue in machine design which allows to have a knowledge of the machine temperature rise. This paper presents the thermal analysis, modeling, and experiments of a linear-switched reluctance machine (LSRM) with toroidally wound mover and segmental structure. First, a 3-D heat flow model with the homogenized region for the presented LSRM is established using the thermal equivalent circuit. The equivalent thermal resistance of the model is developed together with the nodes forming of the thermal resistance network. The thermal identification to each component such as windings and core steel is performed. Then both the numerical 2-D and 3-D heat flow model for the presented LSRM are established by finite-element analysis which can give the detailed temperature distribution of the entire machine. At last, the actual experiment on a prototype is carried out, validating the accuracy, and feasibility of the thermal equivalent model above.