Performance analysis of a PM brushless rotor claw pole motor using 3D FEM

A new type of PM brushless claw pole motor (CPM) with soft magnetic composite (SMC) core is presented and analyzed in this paper. The rotor field of the CPM is generated by the PM mounted on the claw pole surface, the three-phase stator windings are fed with variable-frequency three-phase AC currents. The advantages of the proposed CPM are that there are no slip rings on the rotor, and it can achieve the higher power density and efficiency improvement. The effects of the claw-pole structure parameters, the air-gap length, the phase of stator current and the PM thinner parameter of the proposed CPM on the output torque are investigated by using three-dimensional time-stepping finite element method (3D TS-FEM). The optimal rotor structure of the proposed CPM is obtained by using the response surface methodology (RSM) and the particle swarm optimization (PSO) method and the comparison of full-load performances of the proposed CPM with different material cores (SMC and silicon steel) is analyzed.