IEEE Transactions on Energy Conversion, Vol.33, No.4, 2112-2121, 2018
Investigation of Spoke Array Permanent Magnet Vernier Machine With Alternate Flux Bridges
In recent years, permanent magnet vernier (PMV) machines are attracting more and more attentions owing to their high torque density feature, which is mainly benefited from its special operation principle called flux modulation effect. Nevertheless, It is found that its working flux density is low, viz., similar to 0.3T for modulated flux density in the surface mounted PMV machines. Hence, there is a really large space to further improve the torque density of PMVmachine. The spoke arraymagnet is widely used in the regularPMmachine to improve working flux density. However, the flux barrier effect of spoke array magnet for the PMV machine has been proved, and a large torque reduction would be introduced in the high pole ratio spoke array PMV machine. In this paper, a novel spoke array PMV machine is proposed to improve working flux density and the torque density of PMV machines. The alternate magnetic bridges are added in the rotor core to connect iron pieces with same polarity and provide magnetic circuit for the lowpole number working magnetic field, hence the no-load back EMF and output torque of the proposedmachine can be significantly improved. Moreover, analytical airgap flux density distribution based on equivalent magnetic circuit is presented to reveal themechanism of working flux density improvement, and finite element analysis is used to investigate the performance features and structure parameter influence on the key performances, viz., back EMF and torque, of the proposed machine. Finally, a 25 N.m prototype has been built and tested to validate these analyses.
Keywords:Spoke array magnets;flux modulation principle;equivalent magnetic circuit (EMC);permanent magnet vernier (PMV) machine