Analysis Guideline to Determine Capabilities of IPM Motors for Automotive Application

The performance computation of an Interior Permanent Magnet (IPM) motor designed for an electric vehicle is an interesting engineering problem. Such a machine exhibits very high magnetic and electric loadings, reaching power up to some hundreds kW despite the limited volume. A topic of the recent research is to reach very high power and torque density. Not only the motor performance at rated currents is important, but also that under high overload (intermittent duty). Fast and accurate procedures for the analysis of the IPM motor are required, to predict its capabilities. Some considerations are reported in this paper. As an example an IPM motor is considered, whose size is similar to that of machines used in commercial vehicles. The ambition of this paper is to give a complete guideline for determining the performance of so stressed synchronous PM machines.