A Rapid Design Approach for Transverse Flux Machines in Underwater Applications

In this work, we show a design procedure for Transverse Flux Machines that belong to the class of direct drives, which become more relevant in robotics - also for underwater applications. These drives exhibit a range of advantages, due to the omittance of gears. This usually requires that the geometry is adapted to the motor's use case, which is a demanding task. An analytical modeling approach, based on the work of Pourmoosa [15], is used in combination with the open-source software OpenModelica to simulate arbitrary designs of this type. This allows a fast simulation of a multitude of motors. In combination with a specifically constructed genetic algorithm, we show that preferable designs can be obtained under predefined performance parameters. The method therefore gives rise to useful pre-computations for drives of this kind and potentially allows their usage in more robotic applications.