Electric Motor Design through Simulation Driven approach

Electrification is everywhere! It brings energy efficiency into systems and also helps add new smart functionalities to products. The electric motor is a key element of such systems, converting electricity into mechanical power. It is multiphysics by nature. Electric machine engineers need to take into account various constraints from the early stage of the design, looking at electromechanical performance, as well as respecting thermal and NVH constraints. Simulations need to integrate these multiple physics and also coupling effects. Dedicated tools and streamlined multiphysics workflows are developed in order to reduce complexity and speed up the design. Speakers: Limin Huang, Electromechanical Engineer, Altair Samia Saaidi, Senior Technical Specialist - Electromechanical Solutions, Altair Duration: 20 minutes

A recording of the electric motor development panel discussion as part of the ATCx Electric Powertrain virtual event in March 2021. The panel features insight from Cleef Thackwell, Lead Motor Design Engineer at Jaguar Land Rover; Dr. Lars Fredriksson, VP Global Automotive at Altair; James Eves, Team Manager at Altair; Jonathan Stevens, Senior Development Engineer at Equipmake; Andy Jones, Innovation Program Manager at HiETA Technologies; Sergi Riba, Design Engineer at Safran Ventilation Systems; and Vincent Leconte, Senior Director of Global Business Development, Electromechanical Solutions at Altair.

Andrew Lawton, Principal Research Engineer at Smart Manufacturing Technology. Andrew has worked at SMT for almost 10 years with a focus on the dynamic analysis of drivetrains, including the effect of excitation forces from the electric machine as well as the gears. Andrew’s presentation will cover NVH analysis of an EV drivetrain, specifically with regard to response to electric machine forces generated by Altair Flux.  He will illustrate this by looking at how the presence of unbalanced magnetic pull can affect the NVH response by importing the forces from Flux into MASTA.

James Eves, Team Manager at Altair, Jonathan Stevens, Senior Development Engineer at Equipmake and Andy Jones, Innovation Program Manager at HiETA Technologies, discuss AMPERE, a joint project to produce an extremely lightweight, efficient but low-cost electric motor with an extremely high continuous power density. The consortium will present some of the engineering challenges that designing such a high performance motor has posed, and how these challenges have been overcome through advanced manufacturing technology and simulation driven design.

Sergi Riba, Design Engineer at Safran Ventilation Systems, with a brief introduction by Vincent Leconte, Senior Director of Global Business Development - EM Solution at Altair. Together they discuss the development of electric machines for the aerospace sector.

Dr. Royston Jones, CTO and Dr. Anthony Hahnel, Technical Director, give their keynote presentation during the ATCx Driving Innovation in Electric Powertrain 2021.

Altair’s portfolio of simulation-driven design solutions covers – amongst many other disciplines – electromagnetics (EM) and electronic design automation (EDA).

Vincent Leconte, Director of Business Development - EM Solutions at Altair presents at the 2019 UK e-Mobility Seminar. Optimization of e-Motors, Case Studies: Jaguar Land Rover & Porsche. Cooling Simulation of the eMotors.

Electrification is one of the main means of creating a low-carbon economy, allowing to use renewable energies and energy efficient technologies. Electric power enters many industries and also impacts our everyday lives, especially with the electric mobility. The use of power electronics and control systems allows offering better reliability, safety and low maintenance costs, and also brings additional innovative functions. Learn how Altair simulation and optimization tools can help designing highly efficient electric machines, as well as advanced control strategies to help you build innovative and energy efficient electric solutions.

This presentation introduces an application of a unique, highly automatic, multi-physics design strategy for E-motors, based on a current program at Mercedes-AMG GmbH. The strategy considers essential development requirements including electromagnetics and thermal requirements, NVH, stress and durability. It accommodates for DOE, multi-objective optimization and design exploration methods to be used to explore and find feasible motor designs. The presentation will show how the strategy adds efficiency to the E-motor development process and how it impacts the total costs of development.

The Altair Multiphysics platform provides a broad portfolio of solvers and tools to help engineers develop e-motor design requirements by using simulation and optimization methods. This presentation provides examples, using Altair Machine Learning and optimization solutions, of the e-motor requirements by leveraging in data available, which is key for e-motor designers to reduce time-to-market.

This presentation demonstrates Altair’s capability of simulating the behavior of a mechanically damaged battery from a cell to a pack integrated in a vehicle, based on collaborative research previously conducted with MIT. An innovative approach of applying electromagnetics loss to predict rising temperature due to short circuit effects during an impact is discussed, along with the development of a software tool, Battery Design, which enables OEMs and suppliers to design battery applications using multiphysics optimization, including mechanical-electrical-electrochemical-thermal behaviors.

Presentation by Koby Ingram, Gevasol BV. Conceptual Design and optimization of an Electric Motor using Altair Flux and HyperStudy. The customized electric machine with high level demands and efficiency is a challenging topic requiring top level of expertise and best in class simulation tools. This work focuses on the usage of Flux and Hyperstudy as tools for bettering the design and design process of e-motors. Presentation at the ATCx in Israel, Netanya on October 30, 2019.

Presenters: Ulrich Marl, Key Account Manager for Electric Vehicle Motor-Feedback Systems, Lenord+Bauer & Andy Dyer, MBD Sr Technical Specialist, Altair

This presentation shows a modeling process to quantify the position/speed sensor (e.g, encoder) effects on an e-motor, and corresponding control system for a concept traction motor similar to the Nissan Leaf. The integrated solution of the e-drive is carried in Altair Activate as a system builder, using other Altair solutions e-motor solutions in FluxMotor and Flux to generate data for the e-motor itself, as well as the optimal current values for the Field-Oriented Contoller. The inverter is driven with efficient space vector pulse width modulation. The integrated solution also supports different levels of modeling fidelity for the system components, for example for the e-motor where either direct co-simulation with Flux for detailed finite element analysis or a reduced order model (ROM) using look-up tables. In this way, sensor design parameters can be evaluated within an accurate system of the e-drive to improve performance and efficiency.

This presentation was given on April 11, 2019 at ATCx Electromechanical Applications in Troy, MI.

Presentation by Vincent Leconte, Senior Director of Global Business Development - EM Solution at Altair.

Presentation by Virgiliu Fireteanu, Professor at Politehnica University of Bucharest.

Study based on Flux3D FE models of the influence of stator short circuit, broken rotor bar, and rotor eccentricity on EM torque and rotor unbalanced force in induction motors

Presentation by Loic Rondot, Sensor Modeling Expert at Schneider Electric.

The current sensors modeling is a real numerical challenge for electromagnetic modeling software. Physics is well mastered, but the accuracy expected for the crosstalk computation is generally crippling to use a commercial software. Recently Altair has developed, in collaboration with an academic partner (G2Elab), a new solver that uses on integral volume methods. This new solution, Modeling of Interconnected Power Systems (MIPSE), is very relevant for the current sensors modeling for both volume coils and wire coils.

Presentation by Jose Viyeira, R&D Project Engineer at Vortex Bladeless.
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Vortex Bladeless is developing a technology that extracts energy from the wind thank to Vortex Shedding and Vortex Induced Vibrations (VIV). Among others, the main fields of investigation we are working on are CFD, FEA and Electromagnetic Interactions. Within our technology, these fields are all connected, so one affects the others. For that, Altair’s suite software is helping us not only to understand the phenomena. It is so important that we consider Altair as a part of the process of maturation of the technology.

This technical session focuses on design in electrical engineering, and especially on low frequency electromagnetic simulation. Presentations can be viewed of the latest advances in the Altair simulation solutions - Flux and FluxMotor. Several companies also illustrate how they use these tools to create innovative products. In particular, it is shown how multiphysics approaches consider the various constraints of electric machine design. It is also demonstrated how optimization techniques can be used at various stages of the process, and how powerful they are to meet the many challenges of electro-mechanical design.

Presentations recorded at the 2018 Global ATC in Paris, France on October 18, 2018.