article · IEEE Transactions on Transportation Electrification
Additive manufacturing provides geometric flexibility for designing electric machine components, extending beyond passive frames and shafts to active parts such as windings. Using lightweight materials, including aluminium-silicon-magnesium alloys, three-dimensional printing enables the production of components tailored for weight-critical contexts and high-frequency operation. Several additively manufactured coils made from varied materials were prototyped and evaluated against traditionally manufactured counterparts to target the reduction of high-frequency losses. Alongside these prototypes, a new shaped-profile conductor concept addresses performance limitations by mitigating proximity effects and lowering the influence of cross-slot leakage flux. This combined approach pairs ultralightweight structural benefits with strong electromagnetic performance. Consequently, the method facilitates the creation of electrical machines with elevated power density, presenting an alternative to conventional production approaches in rapidly evolving sectors such as automotive electric drives.
Targeting weight and electrical losses is crucial for improving electric drives in transport sectors such as automotive engineering. By using additive manufacturing to create active parts rather than just casings, machines can become lighter and more efficient at high frequencies. This approach offers a route to achieve higher power density without relying solely on traditional, heavier manufacturing constraints.
This technology is targeted at high-frequency electrical machines, scalable electric drives, and weight-sensitive applications such as the automotive sector. Prospective users include electric motor designers and manufacturers seeking higher power density. The research appears to be applied and tested at an experimental prototype stage, having fabricated and compared physical additively manufactured coils against traditional designs, though the abstract does not indicate whether it has been tested inside fully assembled commercial drives.
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Nowadays, additive manufacturing (AM) is becoming a more feasible solution for scalable electric drives compared to traditional production systems. Also, with the significantly growing automotive sector, innovation in electric machine technology is evolving rapidly. With the unmatched freedom in geometry, AM offers a great deal of flexibility in the design of electrical machine parts. Not only the passive parts can be printed such as the frame and the shaft of the electrical machine, but also active parts, such as windings, can be printed in lightweight materials such as Al–Si–Mg-based alloy. The main focus of this article is to further utilize AM in the design of electrical machine windings, with low weight and low losses especially at high-frequency (HF) operation. Aiming at HF loss reduction, different AM coils are prototyped using different materials, and their performance is compared with traditionally manufactured coils. Moreover, a new design concept of shaped-profile conductors is presented with reduced proximity effect and less impact by the cross-slot leakage flux. This design combines high electromagnetic performance and ultralightweight merits, allowing for higher power density electrical machines.
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DOI: 10.1109/tte.2022.3173126
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