Novel Rotor Structure Employing Large Flux Barrier and Disproportional Airgap for Enhancing Efficiency of IPMSM Adopting Concentrated Winding Structure

Interior permanent magnetic synchronous motors (IPMSMs) adopting concentrated windings have been widely used in industrial applications. To reduce operating costs, it is an important issue to enhance the efficiency of an IPMSM as much as possible while maintaining manufacturing costs. In general, an IPMSM used for an industrial application always operates in a specific operating area according to the required load. Therefore, this paper has two purposes. The first purpose is to propose a novel rotor structure which can enhance efficiency at the target wide-speed middle-torque operating area without additional manufacturing costs. The second purpose is to clarify the design method for a suitable rotor structure depending on its target operating area. Reducing losses is the key to enhancing efficiency. This paper first examines the effects of adopting large flux barriers and a disproportional airgap on copper and iron losses, and clarifies their merits and respective high-efficiency operating areas. Furthermore, to take advantage of the two rotor structures, a novel rotor structure which employs both large flux barriers and a disproportional airgap has been proposed. 2D-FEM (Finite-Element Method) is used for discussion first, and a prototype machine is manufactured to verify the 2D-FEM results. Both 2D-FEM and experimental results show that the proposed rotor structure can enhance the efficiency of an IPMSM most effectively at the target operating area. Moreover, for a low-speed high-torque operating area, adopting only large flux barriers is most suitable. And for a high-speed low-torque operating area, adopting only a disproportional airgap is most suitable.