Improved thermal management and analysis for stator end-windings of electrical machines

Madonna, Vincenzo; Walker, Adam; Giangrande, Paolo; Serra, Giovanni; Gerada, Chris; Galea, Michael

Abstract

In electrical machine design, thermal management plays a key role in improving performance and reducing size. End-windings are commonly identified as the machine hot-spot. Hence, lowering and predicting end-windings temperature are crucial tasks in thermal management of electrical machines. This paper proposes and investigates a non-invasive but effective cooling method that aims for a uniform cooling of a machine’s winding by implementing direct cooling on its end-windings. Modelling and experimental results show that a 25% hot-spot temperature reduction on a particular application can be achieved. To analyse the proposed technique in detail, an accurate but computationally-economic lumped parameter thermal network is developed. Comparison between a ‘standard’ thermal network and its simplified equivalent (with less nodes) is presented where the models are developed and fine-tuned based on experimental data. All the above is used to investigate the potential of the proposed end-winding cooling method with different configurations of the methodology.

Citation

Madonna, V., Walker, A., Giangrande, P., Serra, G., Gerada, C., & Galea, M. (2019). Improved thermal management and analysis for stator end-windings of electrical machines. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, 66(7), 5057-5069. https://doi.org/10.1109/tie.2018.2868288

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Aug 14, 2018
• Online Publication Date: Sep 13, 2018
• Publication Date: Jul 31, 2019
• Deposit Date: Sep 15, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 17, 2018
• Journal: IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics
• Print ISSN: 0278-0046
• Electronic ISSN: 1557-9948
• Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 66
• Issue: 7
• Pages: 5057-5069
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/tie.2018.2868288
• Keywords: Electrical machines; End-windings; Lumped parameter thermal network; Thermal management
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1076778
• Publisher URL: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8464056/
• Additional Information: © 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
• Contract Date: Sep 15, 2018