The paper presents an algorithm and software for the optimal design of permanent magnet brushless DC motors. Such motors are powered by DC voltage sources via semiconductor switches connected to the motor phase belts. The software is adjusted to the design of motors with NdFeB high energy density magnets. An attention has been given to issues important in the design of the motors, i.e., permanent magnet selection, structure of magnetic circuit, and armature windings. Particularly, precision of calculation of the permanent magnet operating point, visualization of selection process of the winding belts, and magnetic circuit dimensioning have been investigated. The authors have been trying to make the equations more specific and accurate than those presented in the literature. The user software interface allows changes in the magnetic circuit dimensions, and in the winding parameters. It is possible to examine simultaneously the influence of these changes on the calculation results. The software operates both with standard and inverted (outer rotor) motor structure. To perform optimization, a non-deterministic method based on the evolution strategy (ž + λ) - ES has been used.

In the electromagnetic field simulation of modern servo drives, the computation of higher time and space harmonics is essential to predict torque pulsations, radial forces, ripple torques and cogging torque. Field computation by conformal map ping (CM) techniques is a time-effective method to compute the radial and tangential field components. In the standard CM approach, computational results of cogging torque simulations as well as overload operations observe deviations to nonlinear finite element (FE) simulations due to the neglection of slot leakage and saturation effects. This paper presents an extension of the classical CM. Additional CM parameters are computed from single finite element computations so as to consider both effects listed above in the model over a wide operation range of the electrical drive. The proposed approach is applied to a surface permanent magnet synchronous machine (SM-PMSM), and compared to numerical results obtained by finite element analysis (FEA). An accuracy similar to that of FE simulations is obtained with however the low computation time that is characteristic for analytical models.