Analysis of Airgap Field Modulation Principle of Flux Guides

The flux guides are adopted in a number of electric machines, such as the synchronous reluctance machine (SynRM) and the brushless doubly fed reluctance machine (BDFRM). This article further develops a novel and unified theoretical approach for the category of machines with flux guides. Specifically, the magnetomotive force (MMF) modulation operator of variable flux guides is proposed based on the general airgap field modulation theory, to describe the modulation behavior on the source magnetizing MMF distribution in detail. Both machine topologies with flux guides, namely, the SynRM and BDFRM, are addressed in detail from the perspective of airgap field modulation mechanism. It is proven that, three kinds of harmonic components with pole pairs of
$p_{f}$
and
$(lN_{MB}\pm p_{f})$
correspond to
$p_{f}$
pole-pair source magnetizing MMF and their relative amplitudes can be characterized by three magnetic field conversion factors. The magnetic field modulation effects of flux guides and simple salient poles are compared in terms of the torque production ability. In addition, electromagnetic performances such as airgap flux density, torque density, and inductance characteristics are correlated with their initial key topological parameters by certain analytical expressions and compared fairly between the SynRM and BDFRM. The agreement among the theoretical analysis and the two-dimensional (2-D) finite element analysis together with experimental test verifies the effectiveness of the proposed analysis.