On the design of partial discharge-free low voltage electrical machines

Madonna, Vincenzo; Giangrande, Paolo; Zhao, Weiduo; Zhang, He; Gerada, Chris; Galea, Michael

Abstract

Modern electrical machines employed in transportation applications are required to provide high performance in terms of power (and torque) density. At the same time, being these applications safety-critical, a significant level of reliability and/or fault tolerance is expected. Among all the factors which can compromise motors reliability, partial discharges inception is one of the most critical, in particular for low voltage, random wound machines. In this paper, the influence of insulation design choices on the performance of a traction electric motor are analysed. The study is based on the Paschen's law for air at sea-level pressure combined with an electrostatic finite element model of the turn-to-turn insulation subsystems, built for determining the electric field. The finite element analysis findings are experimentally validated by detecting the partial discharges inception, on custom-built prototypes.

Citation

Madonna, V., Giangrande, P., Zhao, W., Zhang, H., Gerada, C., & Galea, M. (2019). On the design of partial discharge-free low voltage electrical machines. In 2019 IEEE International Electric Machines & Drives Conference (IEMDC) (1837-1842). https://doi.org/10.1109/IEMDC.2019.8785413

• Conference Name: 2019 IEEE International Electric Machines & Drives Conference (IEMDC)
• Conference Location: San Diego, California, USA
• Start Date: May 12, 2019
• End Date: May 15, 2019
• Acceptance Date: Feb 17, 2019
• Online Publication Date: Aug 5, 2019
• Publication Date: 2019-05
• Deposit Date: Aug 16, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Aug 19, 2019
• Pages: 1837-1842
• Book Title: 2019 IEEE International Electric Machines & Drives Conference (IEMDC)
• ISBN: 978-1-5386-9351-3
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/IEMDC.2019.8785413
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/2441889
• Publisher URL: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8785413
• Additional Information: © 2019 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.