Modelling ventilation and cooling of the rotors of salient pole machines

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) offers the potential to model ventilation and cooling in electrical machines. This can provide the opportunity to optimize the thermal design of machines at an early stage without the need for extensive and costly experimentation. However, designers need to have confidence in the use of CFD and this paper summarizes the results of research work to validate the CFD modelling of large salient pole machines. It is shown that the commercial CFD code Fluent demonstrates a good ability to predict air flow and heat transfer on the rotor of a salient pole machine.