A New Coreless Double-Sided Axial Flux Switching Alternator For Wind Energy Systems

Due to the increased attention towards renewable energy specially wind energy systems, the researches and studies to improve and even developing new alternators designs that will be a good replacement to doubly fed induction generator (DFIG) increased. The present paper introduces a new configuration of axial flux switching machine (AFSM) that is suggested to be used in wind energy systems. There are two studied designs of the rotor in this research. First structure is a doubly-sided cored rotor. After analyzing the field overlay of the cored rotor alternator using finite element analysis (FEA), it is observed that the core is not effective in the magnetic circuit. So, the coreless structure has been designed and studied. Then, a comparison between the two structures has been made in terms of output voltage, total harmonic distortion (THD), saturation effect, no-load and load characteristics. The theoretical results shows that the coreless structure gives better performance than the other structure. The prototype of the two rotor configurations have been built and examined in order to verify the theoretical results.