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A Feasibility Study of Additively Manufactured Heat Guides for Enhanced Heat Transfer in Electrical Machines

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Rafal Wrobel

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This is the authors' accepted manuscript of an article that has been published in its final definitive form by IEEE, 2020.

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Abstract

This paper investigates a new heat extraction approach for application to high-specific-output electrical machines. The proposed technique employs thermally conductive heat guides (HGs) to provide supplementary heat evacuation paths for the machine regions, which are particularly susceptible to high power loss. Here, the research focus has been placed on the stator-winding assembly. The HGs investigated in this work rely solely on conductive heat transfer, in contrast to the solutions involving working fluid phase change, e.g. heat pipes (HPs). It is intended for the HGs to be an integral part of the stator-winding assembly, e.g. HGs incorporated in the winding active and/or end region. Such arrangement however, imposes several design challenges. These are related with the HGs being a source of additional power loss due to the machine’s magnetic flux leakage. The objective of this study is to evaluate a concept of HGs, which are immune to the external magnetic field with good heat transfer capability. To facilitate that, a combination of detailed multi-physics design-optimization together with modern additive manufacturing (AM), (i.e. selective laser melting (SLM) method), has been employed here. The theoretical analysis has been supplemented with an experimental work. A number of stator-winding hardware exemplars (motorettes) incorporating alternative HGs designs have been fabricated and tested. This paper provides a new set of experimental data in support of the authors’ initial work on HGs’ thermal behaviour. The new research findings show that the optimised HGs allow for up to 85% improvement in dissipative heat transfer from the winding body and insignificant additional power loss, for the analysed stator-winding assembly.


Publication metadata

Author(s): Wrobel R, Hussein A

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: IEEE Transactions on Industry Applications

Year: 2020

Volume: 56

Issue: 1

Pages: 205-215

Print publication date: 01/01/2020

Online publication date: 24/10/2019

Acceptance date: 18/10/2019

Date deposited: 25/10/2019

ISSN (print): 0093-9994

ISSN (electronic): 1939-9367

Publisher: IEEE

URL: https://doi.org/10.1109/TIA.2019.2949258

DOI: 10.1109/TIA.2019.2949258


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