Characteristics Verification of a Novel Motor with Two Controllable Rotors

The electrification of automobiles has been gaining momentum recently, and more and more automobiles are being fitted with electric motors and their inverters. In order to reduce the space of the motors and inverters, a motor with two controllable rotors was proposed [1- 2]. This motor has two rotors and one stator. The two rotors can be independently controlled using 3- and 6-phase superimposed currents created by a 6-phase inverter. One rotor is driven by a 3-phase current and the other is driven by a 6-phase current. However, this motor has problems such as low heat dissipation and complicated support structure of the stator because the stator is sandwiched between the two rotors. In order to solve these problems, a motor with its stator on the outside of its rotors was proposed [3]. This motor has also two rotors and one stator, and the two rotors can be independently controlled using 3- and 6-phase superimposed currents. However, this motor has also a problem of a complicated support structure of the middle rotor. Therefore, we proposed a novel motor with two controllable rotors to solve above problems [4]. In this paper, 3D-FEM analysis coupled with vector control is conducted in order to verify that the two rotors can be independently controlled.