Manufacturing Parameter Variation Effects on Performance and Energy Loss on Ultium Traction Motors

Traction motors are optimized to meet performance requirements while minimizing total energy loss over the drive cycle. Any optimized motor design, however, has manufacturing tolerances for the geometric parameters and material properties. These tolerances may be enough to significantly impact motor performance or efficiency. This paper is to analyze the effect of the manufacturing tolerances on two optimized motors that are part of General Motor's Ultium platform. The analysis approach uses the Design of Experiment (DoE) with orthogonal arrays. The possible variation in performance and efficiency is quantified using Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). The tolerances that most significantly impact motor performance are identified for each motor.