Reducing the Finite Element Analysis Based Electric Machine Simulation Effort to a Sixth without the Requirement of Specific Mesh Settings

Electric machine optimization requires the analysis of hundreds to thousands of design candidates. As usually finite element analyses (FEA) are applied, this follows high computational cost and a correspondingly long run time. This work is about applying a rotor angle dependent symmetry, such that only 60 electrical degrees are required to be evaluated. By contrast to the state-of-the-art, the presented research studies this approach for general and thus asymmetric mesh comparing the equivalent machine design regions from which the results are combined. By evaluating the achievable accuracy and understanding the potential and limits of the applied approach, this allows for drastically reducing the runtime for future design and optimization problems by approximately a factor of six.