Surrogate Models for Design and Optimization of Inverter-Fed Synchronous Motor Drives

Design and optimization problems typically require running thousands of motor simulations which can take several hours, if not days. To overcome this bottleneck, surrogate models are often used in engineering design to expedite the process. When inverter-fed motor drives are involved, the cost of generating a finite element (FE) database from a pulsewidth modulated (PWM) current simulations to fit such models can be prohibitive. This article compares an ensemble of surrogate models of synchronous motors generated with sinusoidal and PWM stator excitations, in terms of computational burden and performance. The main contribution resides in showing whether computational resources can be saved with sinusoidal excitation models without compromising the optimization results of a real inverter-fed permanent magnet synchronous motor design.