Automated Mechanical Rotor Design Assessment Based on 2D FEA Results

Abstract

Electrical machine design candidates are typically assessed against several requirements during the development process, including the rotor's mechanical soundness. At present, this is primarily a manual process done by an experienced engineer after the initial electromagnetic design stage. Consequently, there is significant potential to increase the efficiency of the development process and the degree of optimality of the resulting solutions by integrating the mechanical assessment into an automated design optimization workflow. As part of the optimization, the automated process must estimate the mechanical soundness of the current design within a reasonable time and accuracy. To this end, a tailor-made software package combined with a post-processing framework was developed. The software package uses the rotor definition to create and compute a 2D finite element model for the mechanical strain and stress fields. In the post-processing step, a decision is made whether the current geometry should be rejected or further considered in the optimization. Several strategies for such an automated assessment and design decision algorithm are shown and compared in this work.