Development of a Fault-Tolerant Nine-Phase Electric Drive

When talking about electrical machines in mobile applications, fault tolerance and reliability represent fundamental design criteria. Research shows that the fault tolerance of a drive train can be increased by certain measures such as adding a sufficient number of phases and choosing the appropriate combination of both electrical machine and inverter. In this context, the design of a nine-phase electrical permanent magnet synchronous machine including the electromagnetic and mechanical aspects is introduced. Since the presented machine is being built and will then be tested in various fault scenarios, a high level of robustness and flexibility present key factors of the machine's design. The necessary calculations and considerations in order to achieve these goals are presented as part of this paper and an introduction of the planned test setup is given.