Development and Provision of a Novel Infrastructure for Electric Machine Thermal Management

Thermal and flow simulations are crucial for understanding the performance of electric machines. These simulations enable engineers to predict temperature distributions, heat transfer rates, and fluid dynamics, ultimately aiding design optimization and reliability enhancement. Thermal analysis involves evaluating conduction and convection heat transfer mechanisms within a system. Flow analysis, on the other hand, examines the behavior of fluids, including their velocity, pressure, and temperature distributions. The interplay between thermal and flow dynamics is vital for effective cooling and thermal management. The simultaneous solution of flow and conduction problems often lacks computational efficiency. This highlights the need to develop a robust infrastructure for analysis and simulation. This research presents a novel infrastructure that analyzes & simulates the flow and thermal approaches of electric machines. The infrastructure is based on the capability of ANSYS & MATLAB software. The flow analysis and calculation are conducted by developed code in MATLAB based on an analytical lumped parameter model (1D) & flow distribution of electric machine parts is determined. Thermal simulation is done by the CFX-Pre module of ANSYS software. Using its Journal capability to apply a parametric drawing approach for the rotor and stator geometries is based on the characteristics and dimensional data of various parts of the electric machine. The integration between flow and conduction (thermal) is performed by boundary conditions including convection heat transfer coefficient and fluid temperature as post-process and calculation of flow code outputs. The present research explains infrastructure with a comprehensive approach. A salient pole electric machine is selected to be a case study to implement developed infrastructure and workflow from A to Z. The results of the studied electric machine as temperature distribution and values are presented.