Investigation of pole number selection in a synchronous reluctance generator for wind applications

Literature suggests that a number of poles over 6 is not recommended for Synchronous Reluctance Machines (SynRM) up to the kW-range. To investigate if this fact is also valid for multi-MW Synchronous Reluctance Generators (SynRG), this paper compares such a SynRG with 6, 8 and 12 poles. The effect of different pole numbers on average torque, loss, torque-ripple, d and q inductances is investigated. It is shown that, and explained why, the 8 pole machine has similar performance to the 6 pole machine but the 12 pole machine has worse performance.