Simulation of Electric Motors for the Vehicle Industry

This presentation was made at the NAFEMS Eastern European Seminar "Engineering Analysis & Simulation in the Automotive Industry" held on the 7th of November in Bucharest.

Automotive manufacturers and suppliers are constantly challenged with delivering innovative, safe, and dependable vehicles to market as efficiently as possible. As a result, engineering teams must discover, evaluate, and successfully implement leading-edge technology and methods to produce a reliable, effective outcome. Many of these efforts now come together under concepts such as Industry 4.0, Digital Twin, CAE Democratization, and Cloud Solutions. But what do these really mean for you, as a simulation specialist?

Resource Abstract

This seminar will give you an insight of the today’s electric motor designer’s tasks, work flow and show the most important simulation tools on top level. Presentation will follow normal information flow how we gain the motor specification from vehicle requirement and available electrical drive system, than from motor specification simulation continues with electromagnetic and thermal multi-physical predictions. There are many combination that needs consideration while simulation like motor topology, number of slot / pole combination, winding technologies, wire type, cooling strategy. After first estimations are done then a more detailed simulation follows where we trying to freeze the design. Sometimes specifications need also refinement. Mixture of analytical and finite element simulation method will be shown especially for electromagnetic and thermal design aspects. Since vehicle hardly operate in continuous operation it is also important to check simulation results for the whole operation range, not only a specific load point. Therefore to save simulation time analytical methods are validated with finite element results. After simulated toque – speed curve matches with specification, few other important things can be done like checking demagnetization and noise vibration and harshness excitation analysis before freezing design.