Design Process of Advanced Reluctance Machines for Electric Vehicle Applications: On Target Setting, Optimization of Different Reluctance Motors Technologies and Assessment of the Most Promising Propulsion Technology for Electric Vehicle Applications

This paper outlines the process of reluctance motors design for a particular subclass of electric vehicles. The work presented here describes the target setting process of the electric vehicles categories: City Electric Vehicle (CEV), Extended-Range Electric Vehicle (E- REV) and Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle (PHEV). Based on system level simulation and a set of vehicle targets, motor specifications are defined together with a list of parameters to be used in the motor design process. Three different reluctance machines technologies are considered as candidate technologies to meet the requirements previously established: Switched Reluctance Machine (SRM), DC-Excited Flux-Switching Machine (DCEFSM) and Synchronous Reluctance Machine (SynRM). Each motor design process takes into account the electromagnetic, thermal, vibro- acoustic, system-level performance and power electronics aspects of each topology. A direct and objective comparison of the three competing technologies is carried out by an assessment process that allows the selection of a single reluctance machine type to be further developed. This work was part of the ARMEVA project, and European Commission FP7 funded initiative.