Systematic Development and Comparison of Concepts for an Automated Series-Flexible Trickle Winding Process

The electrification of the automotive powertrain leads to new challenges for the production of electric drives. The resulting requirements for efficiency and power density of electric traction drives are currently not sufficiently fulfilled. The stator as an essential component of an electric drive generates the magnetic rotary field. By virtue of this effect the stator winding has a great influence on the performance and efficiency of an electric drive. The “NeWwire” project, as a starting point of this article, is concerned with the development and design of a novel automated winding process for the production of effective stator windings in order to achieve the required improvement in efficiency and performance. Therefore the so-called trickle winding process which is currently mainly carried out manually is to be automated. The goal is the reproducible filling of stator grooves with high copper fill factors in the shortest possible cycle times. To achieve this goal, concepts for suitable plants were developed with the help of the development method according to VDI 2221. At the beginning, the manual trickle winding process was divided into its sub-steps which were examined in detail. By following suitable analogies, solutions for an automated process were found. Finally, possible solution paths of the morphological box were combined to concept ideas. The main focus of the article is on the results of the systematic development steps. For this purpose, functional samples were produced in form of prototypes, their properties analyzed regarding the wire contribution and compared in several test series. The evaluation of these test series closes the main part of the paper.