Comprehensive Review and Systemization of the Product Features of Axial Flux Machines

With the increasing electrification of the powertrain across all mobility applications, the requirements for electric motors are becoming more and more diverse: Depending on the application, the requirements for power and torque vary greatly while at the same time keeping costs, weight and installation space must be kept to a minimum. While the radial flux design has established itself for electric traction drives in the market, axial flux motors also provide great potential for vehicles with high torque requirements and small installation space. The axial arrangement of the components within this topology allows many degrees of freedom in product design, which results in many sub-variants of axial flux motors. However, there is a lack of a uniform and consolidated categorization of these variating design features in both scientific literature and industrial practice. In this work, the different design features of axial flux motors were identified based on an extensive as well as systematic literature research and categorized according to uniform characteristics. As a result, the complex variety of different axial flux motor variants is systematized and standardized, which lays the foundation for a uniform categorization of this motor topology.