The Use of a Spreadsheet Program to Design Motors on a Personal Computer

The use of the personal computer and the wide availability of powerful spreadsheet programs has given the motor designer a very powerful but simple-to-use tool. The use of the Symphony spreadsheet program, presently used to design pancake-type and linear induction motors, is described. As the original design process involved the development of a Fortran program to obtain similar design capabilities, a direct comparison between the development time, using a high-level language, and a spreadsheet program is made. In addition, it is shown how the Fortran program results can be incorporated into the spreadsheet programs to use the graphics capability and documentation features. This topic will be of interest to motor designers and educators.