Electric Machines Solutions

While modern software provides valuable insights, it can be daunting for non-experts to translate these results into practical applications. This is where our on-staff electrical engineering experts shine, as they possess comprehensive knowledge of electric machine standards and excel in navigating the complexities of material utilization, torque optimization, and multi-physics problem-solving. Their expertise allows them to contextualize software outputs, aligning them with operational needs. Collaborating with our on-staff experts not only enhances technical knowledge but also enables efficient decision-making. Leveraging their expertise unlocks the full potential of software-driven analysis, driving productivity, cost-efficiency, and sustainable growth in the dynamic world of motors and generators.

Streamline Electric Machine Design, Estimate and Optimize Performance

The electric machine design industry has advanced rapidly, demanding swift, optimized designs for complex systems and large-scale manufacturing.
Engineers need sophisticated tools for accurate development.
Ansys provides a leading solution with a comprehensive virtual prototyping lab for machine design.
Ansys offers an end-to-end solution from conceptualization to multi-physics analyses and system validation, integrating and automating workflows.
Central to this is Ansys Motor-CAD, enabling initial designs with minimal input data and rapid analysis across a wide torque/speed spectrum.
Motor-CAD’s extensive engineering expertise accelerates the design process.
Motor-CAD significantly impacts industries like automotive and aerospace, serving as a foundational tool for electric machine development and driving innovation across industrial frontiers.
Ansys Motor-CAD and Ansys Maxwell can be used separately or together for enhanced motor design, expanding electric machine topologies and advanced magnetics capabilities.
Combining Motor-CAD and Maxwell allows for expanded efficiency map workflows with 2D and 3D geometries, ISO 26262 certification for passenger vehicles, and preliminary NVH analysis and drive cycle efficiency maps.

Contact for Electrical Machine Consulting

Development Process

Developing electric machines presents numerous challenges requiring advanced solutions to maximize performance, efficiency, and reliability. Challenges include maximizing electromagnetic torque and power density while reducing size and weight, optimizing material usage and cost, preventing magnet demagnetization, and managing insulation voltage breakdown.

Ansys provides a robust design-to-validation platform offering modeling workflows with Motor-CAD/Maxwell and advanced electromagnetic, thermal, and mechanical analysis. Their solutions include system modeling for efficiency map calculations, power electronics design, and virtual testing labs.

Ansys enables advanced material property modeling for core loss, magnetization, and robust 2D and 3D solvers with high-performance computing capabilities. Their multi-physics approach integrates mechanical and NVH analysis with CFD for thermal cooling predictions, supporting single and multiphysics optimization to address challenges such as acoustic noise, mechanical vibration, and lifetime enhancement in electric machine design.

Ansys facilitates comprehensive system integration by seamlessly transferring data from design through analysis and validation to final verification stages. This process mimics human-like testing, ensuring thorough system simulation within a unified workflow.

Given the conflicting requirements of various physics processes in motor design, consolidating all analyses into a single platform is essential. The platform’s primary objective is to evaluate potential designs based on their performance across electromagnetic (EM), structural, thermal, and noise, vibration, and harshness (NVH) analyses.

This integrated approach enables the identification of an optimal design that meets all performance targets across different physics domains. Within Ansys Workbench, a unified coupling workflow is established to facilitate seamless data exchange between analyses.

Following electromagnetic (EM) analysis, loss data is transferred to Ansys Fluent for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis, specifically evaluating cooling through a water-jacket in the motor housing. This analysis provides surface temperature insights crucial for subsequent analyses.

A two-way feedback connection, illustrated in the workflow, links EM and CFD analyses, enabling temperature effects on various quantities to be iteratively refined. Temperature data is further integrated into structural and NVH modules, enhancing accuracy in stress calculations and acoustic noise predictions.

Electric machine configurations necessitate suitable electric drive circuits, and the devised electric apparatus must be compatible with both the electric drive and the digital control setup. Ansys presents a solution that facilitates co-simulation design for electrical machines alongside power electronics and control systems. Specifically, Ansys Maxwell can be seamlessly integrated with Ansys Simplorer, allowing for concurrent simulation during transient studies. This functionality empowers engineers to scrutinize intricate interplays among power electronics, control mechanisms, and magnetic elements. Moreover, it enables the assessment of the impact of motor nonlinearities on the drive control loop executed within the circuit simulation.

FEA Fidelity with Circuits and Systems Simplorer and Twin Builder

Circuit Simulation
Block Diagram Simulation
State Machine Simulation
VHDL-AMS Simulation
Model Libraries
Analog and power electronics components
Control blocks and sensors
Mechanical and hydraulic components
Digital and logic blocks

Electric machine design poses a challenge involving multiple physical phenomena. The incorporation of multi-physics capabilities expedites the design timeline, enhances precision, and facilitates the optimization of electrical machine performance even prior to crafting the initial physical prototype. Ansys Motor-CAD boasts this multi-physics prowess right from the initial design phases, enabling streamlined multi-objective design optimization and offering swift adaptation to evolving demands. The software encompasses electromagnetic, thermal, mechanical, and laboratory modes, proficiently generating efficiency maps and performance evaluations across various drive cycles.

Ansys Granta for Managing & Selecting Material
Advanced Materials Reference Data
Manage Restricted Substances in Bill of Materials
Access to the EMIT consortium
Provide advanced magnetic materials library for electric machines solution

Acquire Fast and Optimal Cooling for Reliable and Efficient Electric Motors

Simultaneously consider all electromagnetic, structural/acoustic, and thermal design performance metrics using accurate CFD/thermal solutions that enable faster, more reliable, and more efficient electric machine designs. Avoid build-and-test by modeling and analysis to minimize testing and prototyping only to a subset of best design points.

Predict the thermal performance of air and liquid cooling (including oil spray and water jackets)
Assess the interdependency of bi-directional electromagnetic and thermal physics coupling.
Predict temperature distribution in critical components like windings, magnets, and laminations with high-performance computing (HPC)

NVH Analysis

Noise, vibration, and harshness (NVH) arising from electric machines can originate from diverse origins and significantly impact how a product is perceived in terms of quality.
As the reduction of noise from one source progresses, other sources begin to hold more significance.
Developing a high-performance electric machine that exhibits favorable sound qualities demands a comprehensive engineering strategy that encompasses both the motor’s magnetic design and the structural/acoustic composition of the housing and supports.

This design procedure can be evaluated through simulation, which enables the concurrent fine-tuning of motor and housing parameters to attain noise-related objectives.

Fatigue Analysis

Ansys nCode DesignLife seamlessly collaborates with Ansys Mechanical to consistently assess the fatigue lifespan of components. By utilizing outcomes derived from finite element analysis (FEA) conducted in Ansys Mechanical and Ansys LS-DYNA, it aggregates wear caused by repetitive loads to ascertain the anticipated lifespan of a product. This process enables swift assessment of various materials and alternative shapes for novel designs, facilitating their optimization according to the intended usage of the product — all well in advance of constructing the initial prototype or incurring costly testing procedures.

Stress and Deformation

The main goal is to reduce mechanical stress to be less than the yield strength of the material. A comparison of the Motor-CAD mechanical model versus the Ansys Mechanical model is illustrated below for a V-shape IPM motor. It shows very good agreement in the maximum stress.

Optimization Solution Approaches

Information coming soon.

Multiple Physics or Multi-Physics Solved in Workbench

Optimize a single motor geometry to meet multiple physics requirements.
Investigate the effect of the motor as a system with interacting physics.

Successful Analysis

We study the structural vibrations caused by the magnetic loads and the sound produced by these vibrations to simulate noise for NVH applications. For electric machine simulation, thermal models are used for temperature dependent effects on magnets. The motor performance can be extracted into reduced order models to study the effects of detailed controller models.