Novel permanent magnet motor drives for electric vehicles

Abstract

Novel permanent magnet (PM) motor drives have been successfully developed to fulfil the special requirements for electric vehicles such as high power density, high efficiency, high starting torque, and high cruising speed. These PM motors are all brushless and consist of various types, namely rectangular-fed, sinusoidal-fed, surface-magnet, buried-magnet, and hybrid. The advent of novel motor configurations lies on the unique electromagnetic topology, including the concept of multipole magnetic circuit and full slot-pitch coil span arrangements, leading to a reduction in both magnetic yoke and copper, decoupling of each phase flux path, and hence an increase in both power density and efficiency. Moreover, with the use of fractional number of slots per pole per phase, the cogging torque can be eliminated. On the other hand, by employing the claw-type rotor structure and fixing an additional field winding as the inner stator, these PM hybrid motors can further provide excellent controllability and improve efficiency map. In the PM motors, by purposely making use of the transformer EMF to prevent the current regulator from saturation, a novel control approach is developed to allow for attaining high-speed constant-power operation which is particularly essential for electric vehicles during cruising. Their design philosophy, control strategy, theoretical analysis, computer simulation, experimental tests and application to electric vehicles are described.