Towards Automated Design and Manufacturing of Power Electronics and Electric Machines through Virtual Prototyping and Advanced Manufacturing

One of the ultimate goals of power electronics and electric machine research is to achieve automated design and manufacturing. Achieving this goal will reduce the design and manufacture cycle, achieve overall optimization, reduce labour efforts, guarantee accuracy and uniformity by using machines with little human intervention and obtain overall system optimization. There are two important enabling technologies involved in this process. One is virtual prototyping and the other is advanced and automated manufacturing. Though there are extensive design and simulation tools to analyze and check control performance as well as analyze various components at the individual component level, effective system-level design and simulation tool, which can address the physical design of the system such as the layout of the system and the structure and shape of the components are still missing. This kind of modelling and simulation process is the so called ‘virtual prototyping’. If successfully developed, it can replace expensive and time consuming ‘hardware prototyping’. The virtual prototyping process involves multi-domain (e.g., electrical, magnetic, thermal, mechanical) and multi-time-scale optimization. A good balance between simulation speed and accuracy is required. Once the power electronics or electric machine system is virtually/digitally prototyped, it may be directly manufactured in an automated or semi-automated way using various manufacturing technologies, including additive manufacturing. This automated manufacturing also requires innovations in converter/electric machine structure design (design for manufacturing), the tooling (e.g., automated winding machine), the use of robotics, and the standardization of components, etc. This paper presents a vision for future automated design and manufacture process for power electronics and electric machine systems and shows the key technologies and challenges involved in this process.