Fault-Tolerant Dual Channels Three-Phase PMSM for Aerospace Applications

Abstract

In safety-critical applications such as aerospace and marine, electrical machines are limited to meet several stringent requirements such as physical, electrical, magnetic and thermal isolation between two three-phase channels, in order to be considered for fault-tolerant operation throughout its service life. This paper presents novel sectored fault-tolerant PM synchronous machines which include single, double and four sectored designs where one pole pair section of the machine’s stator is cut out to meet the fault-tolerant constraints. A detailed electromagnetic analysis is carried out in terms of their electromagnetic performance which is then compared with the benchmark 30s/10p combination for a given output power of 50kW. Due to the heightened power density in the innovative design, a highly effective thermal management system became necessary. This led to the identification of a novel and efficient cooling configuration. Leveraging the four gaps between the four sectors, an efficient cooling system was successfully implemented. As a result, the current density increased by 18.2%, representing an increase of 2A/mm2 compared to the benchmark machine design.

Keywords

• Dual three-phase PMSM
• fault-tolerant machine
• finite element model
• numerical methodology
• computational fluid dynamics and aerospace applications