Design and Performance Evaluation of Concentrated Coil Permanent Magnet Machines for In-Wheel Drives

In this paper a concentrated coil permanent magnet machine topology is proposed for in-wheel drive applications. The finite element based design optimization of the proposed machine is described in detail. A performance comparison is carried out between the proposed interior permanent magnet concentrated coil machine and a surface mounted permanent magnet concentrated coil machine to outline their respective advantages and disadvantages. It is shown that the proposed machine has a wider constant power speed range than that of the surface mounted permanent magnet machine. For validation purposes, a 10 kW concentrated coil permanent magnet machine prototype is built and tested. Good correlation between measured and FE calculated results of the machine is found.