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Manufacturing Methods of Stator Cores With Concentrated Windings
Manufacturing Methods of Stator Cores With Concentrated Windings
Windings
F. Libert*, J. Soulard*
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the difficulties in
manufacturing a stator core with concentrated windings. The
existing solutions are compared in terms of cost, required
equipment for the production and performance of the
permanent-magnet (PM) motor. A 1 kW 28-pole PM motor
with an outer diameter of 400mm, designed for a low-speed
direct-driven application is taken as an example.
Concentrated windings, which are also called non- 2.1 Complete core
overlapping windings, have been widely investigated for PM
machines in the kW power range and above. Concentrated With this method, the entire section of the core is punched in
windings are indeed attractive due to their short end-windings one piece as shown in figure 2a. It is the conventional way to
and the low torque ripple that can be achieved [2]. Compared manufacture the laminations. If the machine does not have a
to conventional distributed windings, the coils are not laminated rotor or an inner stator as in the example of figure
overlapping, which makes the winding much simpler. 1, the centrepiece left after punching is not useful. Therefore,
However, the manufacturing of a stator with concentrated the quantity of wasted iron material is large, around 80 to
windings might not be so easy and inexpensive. The purpose 90% of the total purchased iron material. In addition, for a
of this paper is to investigate the difficulties in manufacturing stator with a large number of teeth, the required force for
a stator core with concentrated windings. Existing solutions punching is considerable. Single tooth punching is then an
are compared in terms of cost, required equipment for the appropriate solution. It requires more time but has the
production and performance of the motor. advantage that a smaller press machine can be used. It could
In this paper, the example of a 1 kW 28-pole PM motor with be possible to use the wasted material inside the ring for
an outer diameter of 400 mm, designed for a low-speed motors with smaller diameters, however causing some logistic
direct-driven application is considered. The motor has an problems for the motor manufacturer.
outer rotor with surface-mounted ferrite permanent magnets For the PM motor in figure 1, an iron sheet with the
as shown in figure 1. The nominal speed of the motor is 250 dimensions of 400 x 400 mm is required. The area of the
rpm. The windings are concentrated, with each tooth carrying stator core is only 18% of the original iron sheet area. Out of
a coil. The inner stator diameter is 250 mm and the active the 22 kg of purchased iron, only 4 kg are used for the stator.
weight of the stator iron is about 4 kg. Different methods to With this method, the manufacturing technique and the
produce the stator core and windings of this motor are machine tools are conventional, but the cost for the iron
investigated and compared. material is high due to the large amount of waste.
Figure 6 shows how a needle winder easily can wind the coils
for a joint-lapped core [1], allowing a high slot fill factor. Figure 7: Mecrow’s segmented lamination allowing easy
This manufacturing method requires special laminations and insertion of pre-wound coils [7].
the investment of a winding-machine specific for this kind of
lamination and windings. 3.3.2 Stator in soft magnetic composites (SMC)
The high cost for the iron laminations caused by the quantity
of wasted material can make SMC material a good solution to
decrease the price of the motor. SMC material has the
drawback of poorer magnetizing curves compared to
conventional iron lamination but the production of SMC parts
is easier and cheaper for high number of parts. SMC is also
well adapted for concentrated windings as the teeth and stator
back can be produced separately [4]. The coils are first placed
around the teeth, which are then assembled to the stator back
(figure 8). The isotropic magnetic properties of the SMC
allow round shaped teeth that enable a high slot fill factor.
Figure 6: Winding the coils of a joint-lapped core from Akita, The solution of a stator in SMC might be of interest for the
[1]. PM motor with needle-wound coils in figure 1 and 5, in order
to minimize its manufacturing cost. 3D finite element method
3.2 Manually-wound coils (FEM) simulations are performed to compare the
performance of the motors with laminated and SMC stators.
A high slot fill factor can be achieved with any core geometry Both motors have identical rotors. For the motor with a stator
if the coils are manually wound around the teeth. The obvious in SMC, the tooth bodies have a rectangular cross-section and
inconvenient is the very slow and costly production. are axially shorter than the rotor. The SMC back and the tooth
tips are as long as the rotor. Since ferrite magnets are used,
3.3 Pre-wound coils the airgap flux created by the PM is low, around 0.4 T. Thus,
it is not decreased considerably with the stator in SMC. At
The coils are wound before setting them into the stator core. nominal load, a 3D FEM simulation shows that the torque is
The same method is used to wind the coils of a conventional decreased by 20% compared to the laminated motor, for the
distributed winding. However, the stator lamination profiles same current (table 1). The torque reduction with the SMC
need to be adapted in order to guarantee a high slot fill factor stator can be partly compensated, since the slot fill factor can
and short end-windings. Different possibilities for the stator easily be increased. The fill factor of the laminated motor
are discussed below. with needle-wound coils is 0.4. With SMC, the slot fill factor
slot fill factor can be achieved. However, it requires special
manufacturing techniques that are patented.
Table 1: Performance of the motors with laminated and SMC At first, both motors have the same number of conductors, the
stators. same slot fill factor and the same copper losses. FEM
simulations show that changing from a semi-closed to an
3.3.3 Stator with special tooth tips open slot geometry reduces the fundamental of the airgap flux
density created by the PM by 34% and reduces the torque at
A method using a special geometry of the tooth tips is load by 31% for the example motor. The tooth width of the
described in Yamada’s patent [12] (figure 9). In a first stage, stator with open slots was then increased to obtain the same
the pre-wound coils are easily placed around the teeth, the slot area as the semi-closed slot stator. With larger teeth, the
tooth tips being vertically aligned with the tooth body. A tool torque is reduced by 26% compared to the semi-closed slot
is then used to bend the tooth tips to their normal position. stator. As shown in figure 10, the slot fill factor can be
This method requires a large distortion of the tooth tips, increased, from 0.4 to 0.6 with open slots. Keeping the copper
which might cause some extra iron losses in the deformed losses constant, the current can thus be increased by 22%.
parts. With this method, it is possible to have joint-lapped With this higher current, the torque of the open-slot motor is
cores, which is more appropriate than welding the segments still 8% lower than the torque of the motor with semi-closed
together, especially when the stator has many teeth. A high slots and a lower slot fill factor.
The presence of tooth tips influences also the cogging torque References
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Acknowledgements [13] A. Yasuo, F. Toshihiko. “Method and Apparatus for
This work has been carried out within the Permanent Magnet Rolling Up Stator Core”, Patent JP2004159417, (2004).
Drives Program of the Competence Center in Electrical
Engineering at the Royal Institute of Technology in
Stockholm. The support from Danaher Motion and Höganäs
AB is gratefully acknowledged.
The software Flux, from Cedrat, has been used for the 2D and
3D FEM simulations.