Study on Improving the Performance of Permanent Magnet Wheel Motor for the Electric Vehicle Application

The wheel motor directly drives the vehicle, so its structural and electromagnetic design has some difficulties, and it will affect the performance improvement of the motor. Based on the exterior-rotor radial-flux permanent magnet (PM) wheel motor, we have done relative study on improving the motor performance from four aspects: magnetization direction and pole number; no-load air-gap flux density; no-load electromagnetic force (EMF); and flux insulation. Theoretical analysis, design data, and simulation results are given in this paper, and we have developed a first-round prototype LQI based on them