Thermal design of a magnet-free axial-flux switch reluctance motor for automotive applications

With the requirement to develop magnet-free motors for automotive application, more design effort is needed for thermal design as the machine temperature limits the motor performance. Thermal design procedure of automotive motor has to fully exploit the modern approaches in electrical machine thermal analysis in terms of accuracy and solving time. This paper proposes a computational-cost-effective way to obtain the optimum thermal design of an axial-flux switched reluctance motor by means of lumped circuit methods with some inputs from Computational Fluid Dynamic simulations.