Iron Loss Calculation in Permanent Magnet Machines Under Unconventional Operations

This paper investigates the iron loss calculation of permanent magnet (PM) machines undertaking unconventional operations, where the high-frequency alternating armature field is only a fraction of the constant PM field. It is found that the iron loss of PM machines undertaking such unconventional operations cannot be calculated reliably as the conventional summation of all the iron loss harmonics predicted by finite-element (FE) methods due to fake iron loss harmonics. Further investigation is conducted on the influence of current frequency and magnitude, FE mesh, and convergence tolerance on the FE predicted iron loss under unconventional operations. It is then proposed in this paper that the iron loss of PM machines undertaking unconventional operations can be calculated as the summation of only the iron loss harmonics, which are insensitive to the convergence tolerance. The analyses are validated by the experimental results.