A 3D analytical model of rotor-excited axial flux switching machine based on MEC and an accurate mapping approach

• A new modeling approach that reduces the computational burden, thereby saving time and cost. • Consider core magnetic saturation, leakage flux, and variations in air-gap flux density, to make it competitive with FEM in terms of accuracy. • Enhance the MEC method by incorporating several new features. • The new machine, RE-AFFSPM, has several notable features. • An accurate flux tube mapping approach is proposed to address challenges. This paper presents a new modeling approach that uses 3D analytical techniques to reduce the computational burden, thereby saving time and cost through a magnetic equivalent circuit (MEC) for a rotor-excited axial flux switching machine (RE-AFFSPM). This method takes into account core magnetic saturation, leakage flux, and variations in air-gap flux density, making it competitive with the finite element method (FEM) in terms of accuracy. This paper aims to enhance the MEC method by incorporating several new features. An electric machine with specific geometric and functional characteristics was utilized to achieve this, which posed additional challenges. The chosen machine, the RE-AFFSPM, has several notable complexities: the rotor components are skewed, there is a gap beneath the permanent magnet (PM) in each rotor segment, it has a two-sided stator structure, a dual rotor design, and variations in geometric coordinates in the radial direction. Accordingly, an accurate flux tube mapping approach is proposed to address these challenges. To validate the proposed method, its results were compared to the FEM, achieving an excellent balance between accuracy and time efficiency.