A Simple 2-D Finite-Element Geometry for Analyzing Surface-Mounted Synchronous Machines With Skewed Rotor Magnets

We present a new 2-D FEM-based system for analyzing permanent-magnet surface-mounted synchronous machines with skewed rotor magnets. The system is based on generating a geometric equivalent non-skewed permanent-magnet distribution that accounts for the skewed distribution of the practical rotor. An appealing feature of the proposed system is that it can be easily performed in any 2-D electromagnetic FEM package by performing a simple change in the geometry of the magnets. Attributes of the method presented here include simplicity, high accuracy, low computational burden, and high speed compared to 3-D and 2-D multislice FEM analysis. Experimental results with both healthy and faulty machines corroborate the effectiveness of the model proposed in this work.