Improving the technical quality of a universal motor using an evolutionary approach

This paper presents a new procedure for designing the rotor and the stator of a universal motor for home appliances that is based on a genetic algorithm (GA). The GA was employed in order to optimize the independent geometric parameters of the rotor/stator lamination with the aim to reduce the main motor´s power losses, i.e. the losses occurring in the iron and the copper. Using this procedure the motor´s technical quality, expressed as efficiency (i.e. the ratio of the motor´s output power to its input power), can be significantly improved. The GA proved to be a simple and efficient search-and-optimization method for solving this day-to-day design problem in industry. It significantly outperformed a conventional ´direct´ design procedure that had been used before.