An Integrated Modular Motor Drive With Shared Cooling for Axial Flux Motor Drives
Abdalla Hussein Mohamed, Hendrik Vansompel, Peter Sergeant
Abstract
In this article, a circumscribing polygon integrated modular motor drive topology with shared cooling for the power converter and the electrical machine is proposed and benchmarked with the nonintegrated version. The proposed topology is applied on an axial flux permanent magnet synchronous machine. The topology is capable of mechanically mounting the power converter, sufficiently cooling both the power converter and the electrical machine, and combining both of them into the same housing. The mechanical and the thermal design are done to ensure thermal decoupling between the power converter and the motor winding, and to provide a low thermal resistance from the power converter and the electrical machine to the ambient. Due to the limited space available for the power converter module, wide bandgap semiconductor technology is chosen for the implementation of the converter module, thanks to their small package size and low power losses. A highly modular, integrated, and compact drive is achieved compared to the nonintegrated one. A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model is developed for one module of the proposed integrated drive to evaluate the maximum current that can be injected by one converter module without exceeding the junction temperature limit of the switches and the maximum winding temperature. An experimental setup is built to validate the results of the introduced multiphysics models.