Electrothermal Coupling Methodologies and Their Influence on the Optimization of Aircraft Electric Motors

This work presents a fully coupled electrothermal motor analysis and optimization framework, where the motor’s electromagnetic performance depends on its temperature distribution, and the temperature distribution simultaneously depends on its electromagnetic performance. Notably, we analytically compute derivatives through this nonlinear, multidisciplinary analysis using coupled adjoints, which enables the exploration of high-dimensional design spaces. We demonstrate the framework on a series of optimization problems that investigate the effect of feedback coupling and serve to highlight the framework’s utility and flexibility. Furthermore, our results indicate that modeling the motor’s electrothermal coupling is critical to accurate performance prediction. We show that designs optimized using a feedforward-coupled model are found to be either infeasible or nonoptimal under the fully coupled feedback analysis; both conditions are unacceptable for aircraft applications, in which performance is critical.