A Novel Dual Three-Phase Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor With Asymmetric Stator Winding

Although three-phase permanent magnet (PM) motors are dominant in industry, multi-phase PM synchronous motors present higher torque-to-weight ratios, better efficiency, and low torque ripple compared with three-phase conventional PM motors. These features make fault-tolerant multi-phase PM motors become attractive for safety-critical applications. In this paper, a novel PM multi-phase motor design with a dual three-phase asymmetric stator winding is proposed. The winding structure of the proposed motor is unconventional due to selected slot-pole combinations. Therefore, an asymmetric winding is needed. The detailed finite-element analysis of the proposed motor and a performance comparison between the conventional integer-slot (72-slot/12-pole motor) with symmetric winding and the unconventional fractional-slot (78-slot/12-pole motor) PM motors with asymmetric windings is performed to see the benefits of the proposed motor. It was shown that the novel unconventional multi-phase PM motor has excellent torque quality and slightly higher torque density levels.