Water Cold Plates for Efficient Cooling: Verified on a Permanent-Magnet Machine With Concentrated Winding

Abstract

The requirement for electrical machines with high power/torque density has stimulated the development of high efficient cooling systems to dissipate the heat within the machines. This article presents a new water cooling topology for thermal management of a permanent-magnet synchronous machine (PMSM) with concentrated windings. The advanced cooling configuration consists of several water cold plates radially inserted into the core laminations. Therefore, the heat sources in laminations and windings are close to the coolant. Three-dimensional electromagnetic finite-element analysis and the computational fluid dynamics are used to evaluate the performance of the PMSM. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed cooling configuration, one PMSM with the proposed cooling configuration and the other with the regular water jacket (WJ) are designed and built under the similar sizes and specifications. The simulated and tested results show that the winding temperature can be reduced by over 20 °C using this cooling technique compared to using the WJ at the rated condition.