Effect of the Manufacturing Impact on the Optimal Electric Machine Design and Performance

This article is about analyzing the change of the optimal design's shape and respective performance measures of permanent magnet synchronous machines considering the manufacturing impact on soft magnetic materials. Typically, the respective material degradation is neglected when optimizing electric machines. However, recent studies reported a significant effect of the manufacturing on soft magnetic materials and, consequently, on the machine's performance. This especially holds for fractional horsepower designs, where the deteriorated zone is relatively wide compared to the overall dimensions. In this work, machine designs are analyzed by both evaluating them with and without considering the manufacturing impact. A case study is defined with typical measures, i.e., efficiency and cogging torque, selected as objectives. The performances and their change due to manufacturing are quantified for all variants investigated. The results allow for comparing the designs' sensitivities regarding the manufacturing impact. In addition, considering a change of emphasis from best rated performance to a tradeoff regarding rated characteristics versus robustness, the respective change of the optimal design's shape is studied. A conclusion is drawn if and how the manufacturing impact shall be incorporated to future optimization scenarios to find designs with promising rated performance while guaranteeing low sensitivity regarding the manufacturing impact.