Promoted content: Innovative motor designs for electric cars come to life

The automotive industry is in the midst of a disruption and the transcendence of electric vehicles from niche to mainstream products is a driving force behind this change.

Yet challenges remain to improve the motor designs used in electric vehicles. One potential solution is the use of Power Magnetic Devices (PMDs), a category of devices that include motors, generators, transformers and inductors. In simple terms, these components utilise an electromagnetic field to convert electrical energy to mechanical energy, or vice versa.

In the field of power engineering, and particularly in the design of PMDs, modern advances are targeted at reducing system losses, mass, volume and cost, while simultaneously increasing power capability, reliability, and large-scale manufacturability.

Achieving these competing objectives in modern applications requires advanced methods to optimise the design of various PMDs such as electric motors. These include computationally efficient device models in conjunction with state-of-the-art optimisation techniques. Furthermore, the design constraints pertaining to electric motors represent a complex multiphysics problem from a mechanical, electrical and thermal perspective.