Additively Manufactured Hollow Conductors Integrated With Heat Pipes: Design Tradeoffs and Hardware Demonstration
Fan Wu, Ayman El‐Refaie, Ali Al-Qarni
Abstract
This article investigates the design of a 250 kW permanent magnet (PM) machine used for aircraft propulsion. The focus is to pursue high specific power (>20 kW/kg), high efficiency (>95%), and low thermal resistance direct-cooling design for the demanding aerospace applications. The proposed key-enabling technology is additively manufactured hollow conductors integrated with heat pipes. Compared to the existing high specific power PM machines for aerospace applications, the proposed design features a much lower speed - 5000 r/min without any torque amplifier, which helps promote the specific power of the overall system. Based on parametric finite-element analysis, tradeoff studies on a variety of winding configurations as well as geometrical parameters have been carried out, highlighting their impact on specific power, winding ac losses, and efficiency. AlSi <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">10</sub> Mg coil samples printed by direct metal laser sintering as well as thermal management system have been demonstrated to show the feasibility of the concepts.