Integrated Design of Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor by Incorporating Magnet Layout and Yoke Topology Optimizations

This paper presents an optimization method for the design of permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) rotor considering a yoke structure and a permanent magnet (PM) layout. PMSM rotor is composed of the yoke and PMs, whose designs greatly influence the PMSM performance. There was a problem in conventional PMSM optimal design method that an obtained PM shape becomes complex. Therefore, the layout of PM with a specific shape is optimized in this study. The topology optimization is applied to the yoke structural optimization. To incorporate the yoke topology and the PM layout optimization problems into the PMSM rotor design problem, it is necessary to correlate those solutions during the optimization process. However, it is difficult to solve those problems simultaneously or individually because of those problems being connected strongly. In order to address the issue, response surface methodology is employed to combine the yoke topology optimization problem and the PM layout optimization problem by focusing on a hierarchy of problems. The effectiveness of the proposed method is shown by a numerical example.