IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MAGNETICS, VOL. 57, NO.

2, FEBRUARY 2021 8201205

Application of Magnetic Metal 3-D Printing on the Integration of

Axial-Flow Impeller Fan Motor Design
Sheng-Tse Wu1 , Po-Wei Huang 1, Tsung-Wei Chang1, I-Hua Jiang1 , and Mi-Ching Tsai 1,2

1
Electrical Motor Technology Research Center, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan 70101, Taiwan
2
Department of Mechanical Engineering, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan 70101, Taiwan

This article aims to implement a fan motor design with an airfoil-shaped rotor via the newly developed 3-D printing method.
This integrated design is originated from a flux-switching permanent magnet motor, in which the motor rotor can directly produce
airflow without any external impellers. Such a design and manufacturing process can effectively enhance the robustness of the fan
motor structure and increase its power density. This article adopts 3-D finite element analysis for electromagnetic and fluid field
simulation. Moreover, a new metal 3-D printing method with a low core loss feature during high frequency operation is applied.
Finally, the experimental results with a prototype are presented to verify the designed performance.
Index Terms— 3D printing, additive manufacturing, flux-switching permanent magnet motor (FSPM).

I. I NTRODUCTION problems of the 3-D structure and high frequency core loss.

T HE flux-switching permanent magnet motor (FSPM) is

an attractive choice for use in axial-flow machines, espe-
cially in aerospace industry applications, which require high
efficiency, high speed airflow, and high power density [1]–[3].
The FSPM features a stator with windings and permanent
magnets, as well as a rotor that consists of only soft magnetic
materials; thus, this motor could achieve the robust structure
of a switch reluctance motor (SRM) and high efficiency as a
permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM).
Moreover, with its simple rotor structure, FSPMs can be
easily implemented with a combination of a skew stator
and an airfoil-shaped rotor [4]–[6], which means that these
motors have the possibility of being designed to produce
airflow without impellers. Therefore, the volume of a fan
machine could be significantly reduced, as compared with the
traditional volume.
Different from the traditional FSPM design, in order to
produce the target airflow while maintaining the required
output power, the blade shape design becomes very important,
as it has direct influence on electromagnetic and aerodynamic
energy conversion. The rotor salience pole must be designed
with good permeability to produce torque and provide suffi-
cient airflow at the rated rotational speed [4].
Compared with other motors at the same speed, it is known
that FSPMs have higher operating frequency and core losses,
thus, using thin steel sheets could be a possible solution for the
problem of high frequency core loss. However, the traditional
2-D steel sheet lamination fabrication has difficulties forming
the required 3-D curved shapes such as the abovementioned
impellers of the fan machine.
The application of soft magnetic composite (SMC) might be
one of the potential methods that can simultaneously solve the
Manuscript received May 8, 2020; revised July 13, 2020; accepted July 29,
2020. Date of publication August 10, 2020; date of current version January 20,
2021. Corresponding author: M.-C. Tsai (e-mail: mctsai@mail.ncku.edu.tw).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this article are available
online at https://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TMAG.2020.3014651
0018-9464 © 2020 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See https://www.ieee.org/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
Furthermore, the robustness of such structures during high
speed operations must be further considered, as robustness
is highly determined by the manufacturing process and the
insulation binder material. Moreover, SMC process eliminates
the requirement of a predesigned mold to press the motor core
and the extended prototype verification time.
This article proposes a fast SMC manufacturing process
with metal selective laser melting (SLM) additive manufac-
turing, namely 3-D printing, which can achieve rapid pro-
totyping, low core loss, and high structure robustness for
high frequency operation [7]–[9]. An integrated fan motor
with an airfoil-shaped rotor is designed for comparison with
a particular commercial fan motor, where the characteristics,
such as airflow, speed, and torque responses, are verified by
3-D FEA simulation and experiments with a prototype based
on SLM 3-D printing.
II. M ODEL D ESCRIPTION
A. Electric Machine Design
A commercial 40 × 40 mm radiator fan with 11.5 CFM
airflow is chosen as the airflow design target in this article.
Fig. 1 shows a traditional FSPM design, as based on a 12 V,
three phases, six slots, and seven poles rotor. The detailed
design specifications of the FSPM are shown in Table I.
B. Axial-Flow Impeller Design
As shown in Fig. 2, W1 , W2 , α1 , α2 , and s, respectively, are
the inlet velocity, outlet velocity, inlet absolute angle, outlet
absolute angle, and blade pitch for an airfoil-shaped rotor. The
turn angle Ia is the difference between the relative angles of
outlet velocity and average velocity [6].
The turn angle design of the rotor tooth is critical to bring
the maximum air flow of the FSPM rotor. Based on the speed
triangle method, the turn angle of the rotor tooth is designed
to 47.7◦ to meet the target airflow of 11.5 CFM.

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 8201205 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MAGNETICS, VOL. 57, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2021

Fig. 1. 6s/7p FSPM.

TABLE I
S PECIFICATION OF 6 S /7 P FSPM Fig. 3. Integrated motor with airfoil-shaped rotor. (a) Motor. (b) Rotor.
(C) Stator.

rotor skew, the turn angle of the blades would decrease the
torque and power density. To circumvent this, the stator is also
skewed to an angle corresponding to the rotor poles, in order
to maintain the interaction face between the stator and rotor
flux, as shown in Fig. 3(a).
To fit the curve shape of the rotor blades, the stator skew
angle, as shown in Fig. 3(c), would not be a constant value,
which would cause fabrication difficulties to the magnets
between two stator pieces.
While a parallelogram magnet is used to simplify the
manufacturing process, it increases the reluctance and flux
variation of air gap flux density Bg,pk ; therefore, torque ripple
and back electromotive force (EMF) harmonics would also
increase. The back EMF E pk and output torque Tout of the
integrated motor can be verified by the following equations,
respectively, [4]:
 
fe
E pk = 2π 2 Nt Bg,pk K m K t K curve Dis L e (1)
Ns
√ 2  
2π Nr
Tout = K m K t K curve η Bg,pk As,rms Dis2 L e (2)
4 Ns
where Nt is the turns per phase; K m is the magnetizing
coefficient; K t is the stator tooth width over the stator pole
pitch; K curve is the coefficient that accounts for the curvature
effect between the new integrated fan motor and straight
rotor FSPM; Dis is the stator inner diameter; Ns and Nr
Fig. 2. Rotor tooth design with airflow consideration. are the number of stator slots and rotor poles, respectively;
L e is the effective motor length; As,rms is the current density;
η is the motor efficiency; and f e is the operation electric
C. Integrated Motor Design frequency.

The width of a general impeller blade is supposed to be thin

to bring more airflow; however, thin blades would decrease
the flux interaction and torque capability in the air gap of
the integrated fan motor in this article. Therefore, as shown
in Fig. 3(b), the blade width is designed to 2.5 mm, in order
to maintain torque. In addition, much like a conventional
D. Motor Fabrication Basing on SLM
As the integrated fan motor must produce airflow, it would
be very difficult to implement the airfoil-shaped rotor and
skewed stator using traditional electric steel sheets. In addition
to the complex structure, the integrated fan motor design is

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 WU et al.: APPLICATION OF MAGNETIC METAL 3-D PRINTING
Fig. 4. B–H curve comparison of steel sheet and SMC.
Fig. 5. Core loss versus different frequency and oxygen density.
based on FSPM, which is capable of operating at 10 000 rpm
and 1.16 (kHz) operational frequency. The operation electric
frequency of FSPM is given as
ωm
f e = Nr (3)
60
where ωm is the rotor speed (rpm). Note that high frequency
operation will cause high eddy current loss in the integrated
motor; therefore, an SLM 3-D printing technique with a spe-
cial oxide insulation layer, as well as SMC powder, is applied
to fabricate the proposed integrated motor [9].
The component of the SMC power used in this article
is FeSiCr. The oxide layer process is used to alternate the
traditional coating layer around the iron powder, which means
the motor structure could have better robustness after the laser
melting process, while still maintaining low core losses during
high frequency operation [7], [8].
However, the oxide layer process would also increase
the reluctance as traditional SMC reduces permeability.
Fig. 4 shows the B–H curve comparison of the 25CS1500HF
steel sheet from China Steel and the SMC powder applied in
this article.
Moreover, the oxygen density of the laser chamber should
be controlled to create the proper insulation layer thickness [9].
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8201205
Fig. 6. Back EMF at 3000 rpm.
Fig. 7. Distribution of flux density.
Fig. 5 shows the experimental results of the core loss variations
with different thickness and frequencies. As could be seen,
the thickness of the oxide layer is disproportional to the
high frequency core loss and permeability, and thus, has
optimization value.
III. S IMULATION R ESULTS
This article carried out 3-D finite element analysis simula-
tion of an integrated fan motor. Fig. 6 shows the three-phase
back EMF at a speed of 3000 rpm. It was found that the
complicated structure would cause higher back EMF ripple
and harmonic.
The distribution of the flux density of the integrated fan
motor is shown in Fig. 7, where it is observed that the flux
density on the rotor pole is 1.2 T, which is lower than the
traditional FSPM with steel sheets due to the lower relative
permeability of SMC.
Fig. 8 illustrates that the integrated fan design can rotate to
6345 rpm under the rated load of 30 mN m and 10 000 rpm
without additional load. The efficiency under the rated load
is about 62%, and this performance could be significantly
improved by the SMC powder selection of changing the
composition and percentage of iron and silicon [9].
In addition to electromagnetic analysis, the simulated result
of the rotor airflow is shown in Fig. 9, where it is observed
that the rotor can produce an air flow of 11.3 CFM at the
maximum speed, which is close to the design target.
 8201205 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MAGNETICS, VOL. 57, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2021

Fig. 8. Speed response under different loads.

Fig. 11. Complete motor prototype.

Fig. 9. Rotor airflow simulated via FEA.

Fig. 12. Back EMF at 3000 rpm.

Fig. 10. Stator and rotor prototype manufactured by SLM.

IV. P ROTOTYPE AND E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS

A. Implementation and Assembly
Fig. 10 depicts the stator and rotor SLM manufacturing
process. To fix and assemble each piece of stator and magnet,
a particular frame with tenons is used and the assembled
prototype of the integrated fan motor is shown in Fig. 11.
Moreover, this prototype is designed with a sensorless driver.
B. Motor Performance Measurement
Fig. 12 refers that the peak back EMF of the integrated
motor at 3000 rpm is about 1.5 V and the same as the
simulation result is shown in Fig. 7.
Fig. 13 shows the measurement platform of the integrated
fan motor via the dynamometer. It is noted that the measured
Fig. 13. Integrated fan motor measured via dynamometer.
subject is a combination of a motor and a fan; hence,
the measurement result is based on system performance, not
just motor performance as conducted in traditional practice,
thus, the loads from the dynamometer and the airflow at the
impellers are included in this platform.
The speed–torque curve of the prototype is shown in Fig. 14.
It is found that the maximum speed of the integrated fan motor
is able to reach 10 500 and 6000 rpm under the rated load
of 30 mN m.

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 WU et al.: APPLICATION OF MAGNETIC METAL 3-D PRINTING
Steel for their supports.
Fig. 14. Speed–torque curve of integrated motor measured by dynamometer.
V. C ONCLUSION
This article realizes a possible design that integrates an
impeller and FSPM with a special oxide insulation SMC
powder, which is based on the SLM 3-D printing method. With
this new fabrication method, a 3-D structure motor with high
structural strength and low core loss during high frequency
operation could be faster achieved. This article carried out
3-D FEA electromagnetic and fluid dynamics analysis for
design verification. Moreover, a prototype was constructed and
the experimental results coincide with the design and FEA
simulation.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and
Technology, Taiwan, under Grant MOST 108-2622-8-006-014
and Grant MOST 108-2218-E-006-009.
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8201205
The authors are grateful to ANSYS Corporation and China
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