Design Optimisation Approach of an Outer Rotor Multiphase PM Actuator for Multirotor Aerial Vehicle Applications

Abstract

The electric urban air mobility sector has gained significant attraction in public debates, particularly with the proliferation of announcements demonstrating new aerial vehicles and the infrastructure that goes with them. In this context, the development of new methodologies for the design and sizing of actuation systems, ensuring high performances of these aerial vehicles, remains an important task in this process. This will allow for better integration within this transport sector. In this paper, a robust design optimisation approach of multiphase fault-tolerant (FT) outer rotor (OR) permanent magnets (PM) for multirotor aerial vehicle applications is proposed. In order to show the effectiveness and the robustness of the proposed design methodology, the number of stator winding phases, with a fractional slot concentrated winding (FSCW) configuration, as well as the PM configuration are considered as variables. Thus, four cases for the number of phases are considered, namely 3, 5, 6 and 7 phases, where for each number of phases case, the PM takes 3 configurations, namely surface PM, interior V-shape PM and interior spoke PM. First, a pre-sizing step is carried out, consisting of selecting the optimal combinations slot/pole, designing the multiphase FSCW layout, and estimating the electric motor (EM) geometry using analytical computations to obtain a preliminary validation of the design specifications. Second, constrained multiobjective optimisation is considered in order to optimise the EM performances, such as motor efficiency and weight, under constraints where the FEMM/Matlab based Finite Element Analysis (FEA) tool is used to perform this optimisation. Finally, results analysis and performance comparisons of different EM configurations are carried out in order to assess the design parameters, such as phases number, PM position, and harmonic currents in the EM design and consequently to select the best configuration for the considered application.