4028 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MAGNETICS, VOL. 49, NO.

7, JULY 2013

Cogging Torque Reduction by Slot-Opening

Shift for Permanent Magnet Machines
Ting Liu , Shoudao Huang , Jian Gao , and Kaiyuan Lu
Institute of Electrical and Information Engineering, Hunan University, Changsha 410082, China
Department of Energy Technology, Aalborg University, Aalborg 9000, Denmark

In this paper, an effective cogging torque reduction method based on shifting the slot-openings is presented. Stator teeth are divided
into groups and proper slot-opening shift is applied for each group. The cogging torque can then be greatly reduced while the back-EMF
waveforms remain symmetrical. No additional back-EMF harmonic components will be introduced by this method. Analytical analysis
revealing the working principle of this method is given, which gives a clear guide about how this method may be applied to different
permanent magnet machines.
Index Terms—Cogging torque, permanent magnet machine, slot-opening shift.

I. INTRODUCTION where is the harmonic index. is the number of periods

of the cogging torque over one mechanical revolution. Its value

C OGGINGtorque reduction methodshavebeenreported ex-

tensively for permanent magnet (PM) machines. The typ-
ical methods, e.g., [1]–[3], are based on slot skewing, magnet
equals to the least common multiple of the number of stator slots
, and the number of rotor poles . Angle represents the
relative position between the rotor and the stator tooth.
shifting, pole-arc optimization, and use of auxiliary slots or teeth, is a coefficient generated during Fourier transformation of the
etc. This paper focuses on the slot-opening shift method, which cogging torque waveform.
is another effective method for cogging torque reduction. Some Equation (1) may be applied to each tooth of the machine.
of the existing methods, like the rotor teeth pairing method [4] The total cogging torque may then be treated as a combination
and use of non-uniformly distributed teeth [5], may be treated as of the cogging torque produced by each tooth [7]. The value of
similar methods to the slot-opening shift method. But in these in (1) must be integer times the number of rotor poles .
existing methods, the three-phase back-EMF waveforms are dis- Denoting the ratio between and as , for an arbitrary
torted,duetothevariation ofstatortoothwidthneeded forcogging tooth indexed by , its cogging torque produced
torque reduction. In [6], the slot-opening shift method was imple- becomes
mented for a 6-pole, 18-slot BLDC motor. A Response Surface
Method (RSM) based optimization approach was used to find the
optimum slot-opening shift angle. This approach gives good re- (2)
sult but it lacks of in-depth analysis of how a proper shift angle
may be determined quickly and reliably, which makes it difficult
where is the Fourier coefficient. Angle is the relative
to be applied to other machines with different number of slots
position of this stator tooth (tooth number ) with respect to
and/or rotor poles.
the reference stator tooth (tooth number 1). Therefore,
In this paper, analytical analysis revealing the relationship
. The total cogging torque may then be obtained by
between the cogging torque and the slot-opening shift angle is
summing up the individual cogging torque for all the stator
presented. An effective approach for cogging torque reduction
teeth, which gives
based on slot-opening shift is then proposed. In the proposed
method, by keeping the center lines of the slots unchanged,
shifted slot-openings will not deteriorate the three-phase (3)
back-EMF waveforms.

Observed from (3), when is an integer number, then

II. THEORETICAL BASIS: DEVELOPMENT OF COGGING
TORQUE FROM A SINGLE SLOT ANALYSIS
The cogging torque of PM machines produced by the inter-
action between a single stator tooth and the rotor poles without
skewing effects may be expressed as [3]
independent on the tooth number , it is always valid that
. This suggests that
individual cogging torque produced by each tooth, as well as
the total cogging torque, are all in phase. The total cogging
torque is therefore times the individual cogging torque, as

(4)
(1)

In other cases when does not result in an integer

Manuscript received November 09, 2012; revised December 21, 2012; ac-
cepted January 04, 2013. Date of current version July 15, 2013. Corresponding
author: T. Liu (e-mail: liuting_@139.com).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TMAG.2013.2239977
number, the cogging torque generated by different teeth will
not be in phase anymore. Equation (3) will then be difficult
to be simplified. To ease the analysis of the cogging in such
complicated situation, in this paper, a special treatment is
proposed. A certain number of adjacent slots are combined
into one group. Selection criteria of the groups will be that

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LIU et al.: COGGING TORQUE REDUCTION BY SLOT-OPENING SHIFT FOR PERMANENT MAGNET MACHINES 4029

the cogging torque produced by different groups is always in

phase. In such a way, the total cogging torque may be linked to
the individual group cogging torque directly.
Taking adjacent teeth (slots) as a group, it is obvious to find
that should be equal to the number of cogging torque periods
per pole, i.e., . will always be an integer number
since equals to the least common multiple of the number of
stator slots , and the number of rotor poles . The number of
groups may then be found to be , where . The
cogging torque for a particular tooth is given in (2). Re-write
(2) in the following form as

(5) Fig. 1. No-load magnetic field distributions for different number of slots used
in machines. (a) 1-slot. (b) 3-slot. (c) 6-slot. (d) 6 slot with slot-opening shifted.

The cogging torque produced by one group containing teeth

(slots) will be the sum of the cogging torque produced by each
tooth within this group, as

(6)

Equation (6) may be simplified to

(7)
Because in (7) is always an integer number, the value
of is therefore zero. Cogging torque component
will then only exist for particular harmonic index that makes
an integer number and consequently be-
comes zero. For those values, (7) could be simplified to
(8)
The total cogging torque will be the number of groups
multiplying single group cogging torque given in (8), as
(9)
As defined before, index should take the value of
and its multiples, which result in an integer number of
as required. Given and is a positive integer index
representing integer multiples of , (9) becomes
(10)
III. FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS OF COGGING
TORQUE AND SLOT-OPENING SHIFT EFFECTS
A. Cogging Torque versus Number of Slots
A 12-slot, 8-pole surface-mounted PM motor (with , torque reduction. The resultant cogging torque for those two
, , and ) is studied as an example to vali-
date the analysis presented previously. The fundamental model
is a machine with only 1-slot, as shown in Fig. 1(a). For this
12-slot, 8-pole machine, the required number of slots forming
one group is 3 . Therefore, according to the analysis
given in Section II, each slot group should produce the same
cogging torque. This may be validated by studying the 3-, 6-,
Fig. 2. Cogging torque for 1-, 3-, 6-, 9-, and 12-slot machines.
9-, and 12-slot machines (the 3-slot and 6-slot machine models
are given in Fig. 1 as examples). The cogging torque for the ma-
chines with different numbers of slots is shown in Fig. 2.
It may be observed from Fig. 2 that though the cogging torque
produced by a 1-slot machine and that produced by a 3-slot ma-
chine behave quite differently, by combining 3 slots into one
group (which corresponds to one period of the cogging torque
waveform per pole, as ), the cogging torque pro-
duced by 3-, 6-, 9-, and 12-slot machines is all in phase and
the magnitude is proportional to the number of groups. This has
been explained previously and may be observed from Fig. 2.
Based on the special feature of the cogging torque profiles
viewed in groups, a simple but effective cogging torque reduc-
tion method may then be introduced. By shifting the slot-open-
ings belonging to the same group, the cogging torque waveform
of this group will also be shifted. Since the cogging torque pro-
duced by each group (containing 3 slots in this case) is in phase,
therefore, by shifting the slot-openings for one group in one di-
rection and shifting the slot-openings in the other group in the
opposite direction, the total combined cogging torque of these
two groups will be reduced. Fig. 1(c) shows a 6-slot machine
with no slot-opening shift. Fig. 1(d) shows that the slot-open-
ings of the right three slots are shifted 1/8 tooth pitch in the
anti-clockwise direction while the slot-openings of the left three
slots are shifted 1/8 tooth pitch in the clockwise direction. Those
two groups form one pair of groups when considering cogging
cases are shown in Fig. 3, where significant cogging torque re-
duction offered by slot-opening shift can be observed.
B. Calculation of the Desired Shift Angle
It is easy to find that in order to reduce effectively the cog-
ging torque, the relative angle shift between the two cogging

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4030 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MAGNETICS, VOL. 49, NO. 7, JULY 2013

TABLE I
MAIN PARAMETERS OF THE TWO SELECTED MACHINES

Fig. 3. Cogging torque for machines with and without slot-opening shift.
TABLE II
SLOT-OPENING SHIFTING ANGLES (8-POLE 12-SLOT MACHINE)
torque waveforms produced by one pair of groups should be
180 el.degrees. The cogging torque produced by one group will
have fundamental periods over one mechanical revolution.
Therefore for a particular harmonic component indexed by , it
will have periods over mechanical radians. The desired
180 el. degrees shift will then result in the following mechanical
degrees:
(11) TABLE III
SLOT-OPENING SHIFTING ANGLES (4-POLE 30-SLOT MACHINE)
Therefore the slot-opening shift angle for one group could
be and its paired group should then have an angle shift of
. A more general way for cogging torque reduction could
be to use more groups. Supposing there are
groups considered together, and is a particular number that
will make an integer. Therefore the total cogging torque
(10) may be transformed to

(12)

Further manipulation of (12) yields

(13)
Therefore, for forcing a particular cogging torque harmonic
component to be zero, , which is the desired shifting angle for
each group, should be chosen to make the numerator of (13) to
be zero while the denominator of (13) is not zero. The minimum Fig. 4. Comparison of the cogging torque (8-pole 12-slot).
angle that fulfills these requirements will be

(14)
For a special case when , (14) is the same as (11).
IV. CASE STUDIES AND THEORY VALIDATION
A. Case Studies
The discussed method is applied to two machines with
12-slot, 8-pole, and 30-slot, 4-pole, respectively. The main
parameters of the two machines are listed in Table I.
For the 12-slot 8-pole machine, its least common multiple of
the number of slots (which is 12) and number of poles (which is
8) is 24 . The number of slots per group will be
. By using (11), taking the fundamental component
as the predominant cogging torque component to suppress, the
relative shift angle for one pair of groups will be
. The angle shift for each group is given in Table II, where
the stator teeth are numbered as , and the groups are
numbers as . After the first shift of all the groups, there
is still one pair of groups left ( and ), which suggests that
an additional shift of the slot-openings may be introduced. After
the first shift, the number of cogging torque periods over one
revolution becomes . Therefore, the shift angle for the
second shift of the slot-openings becomes .
The desired shifting angle for the 30-slot 4-pole machine
may be found similarly and the results are shown
in Table III. By using (11), it is found that . After the
first shift, there will be no paired groups available and a second
shift of the slot-openings is not possible.
B. Verification by FEM
As shown in Fig. 4, the amplitude of the cogging torque for
the 8-pole, 12-slot machine with no slot-opening shift is 126.6
mNm. After the first shift of the slot-openings, the period of
the cogging torque is doubled while its amplitude is reduced to
38.2 mNm. After the second slot-opening shift, the amplitude of

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LIU et al.: COGGING TORQUE REDUCTION BY SLOT-OPENING SHIFT FOR PERMANENT MAGNET MACHINES
Fig. 5. Comparison of the cogging torque (4-pole 30-slot).
Fig. 6. FFT analysis of the cogging torque. (a) 8-pole 12-slot. (b) 4-pole
30-slot.
the cogging torque is further reduced and now is 86.4% smaller
than its original value. For the 4-pole, 30-slot machine, a shift
of the slot-openings results in a 61.2% reduction of the cogging
torque, as shown in Fig. 5.
An FFT analysis of the cogging torque waveforms is shown
in Fig. 6. It may be observed that slot-opening shift can reduce
significantly the fundamental and 2nd order cogging torque
components for the 8-pole, 12-slot machine. For the 4-pole,
30-slot machine, its fundamental cogging torque component
is reduced significantly. But the high 2nd order harmonic is
remained, which is mainly due to that a second shift of the
slot-openings is not possible for this 4-pole, 30-slot combina-
tion as discussed previously.
The back-EMF waveforms before and after the slot-opening
shift for the 8-pole, 12-slot machine are shown in Fig. 7, as an
example. It may be observed that after the slot-opening shift,
the three-phase back-EMF waveforms remain symmetrical and
no additional harmonic components are introduced. The am-
plitude of the fundamental back-EMF waveform is slightly re-
duced, but the total harmonic distortion (THD) has also been re-
duced from 7.3% to 2.7%. Similar phenomenon was observed
for the 4-pole, 30-slot machine. Due to the slightly reduced fun-
damental back-EMF component, the machine output torque will
also be slightly reduced.
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4031
Fig. 7. Comparison of the back EMF. (a) Waveforms. (b) FFT analysis.
V. CONCLUSION
In this paper, a slot-opening shift method is presented for
cogging torque reduction. Application of this method to an
8-pole, 12-slot machine brings a cogging torque reduction of
86.4%. The cogging torque reduction is 61.2% when applied
to a 4-pole, 30-slot machine. In the meantime, the symmetry of
the three-phase back-EMF is maintained and no additional har-
monic components are introduced to the back-EMF. Analytical
analysis that leads to a good understanding of the mechanism
behind this method is provided, which gives a useful guide
about the implementation of this method to other types of PM
machines.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was supported by a grant from the International
cooperation in science and technology project of China (No.
2011DFA62240).
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