While it is safe to say that the certainty of vehicle electrification has never been so apparent, the debate on the appropriate level of electrification and appropriate system to get there is still ongoing and it’s likely to stay that way for the conceivable future. The customers are becoming more familiar and captivated with HEVs while their needs and desires in this space are evolving, hence driving the demand for a wider range of electrified vehicles including; BEVs (Chevy Spark), EREV (Chevy Volt 2), PHEV (Cadillac CT6), Fuel Cell etc. This talk focuses on electric machines for traction application, common key enabler of vehicle electrification. Specifically, we will discuss a range of electric machines designed and developed over the last decade in support of vehicle electrification at General Motors.
Although each application brings along its unique set of system and component level requirements and challenges, some characteristics and requirements are common across the entire portfolio. Specifically, for electric traction machines, some key common requirements are: Relatively high torque and power density, wide speed operating range, high efficiency in low to medium torque ranges over the large speed span, wide temperature operating range, high transient thermal capacity, reliability, excellent NVH metrics, mass manufacturability and ultimately, the cost. All combined constitute a tall engineering order by any measure and no single electric machine topology can meet it all across the application spectrum. At GM, over the years, we have designed and developed various electric machines, optimized for specific application needs and those will be the focal point of this discussion.

Model-Based Design is a proven method of using system-level simulation to develop embedded software for motor control systems. The approach is improved with the use of higher fidelity FEA-based motor models. In this presentation, MathWorks will describe Model-Based Design, with emphasis on motor modeling and the joint efforts between JMAG and MathWorks to improve importing motor model data from JMAG FEA software into Simulink.

With the assistance of enhanced capabilities of computers and other contributing factors, FEM analysis has been extensively used for handling a broad range of objects from the understanding of physical phenomena in such as structures, fluids and magnetic fields to solving coupled problems of these phenomena. In addition, the application range has been expanding. For instance, the use of FEM analysis allows us to elicit the ultimate capabilities of things in combination with optimization methods and other means. In this lecture, the future potential of FEM analysis is discussed and the development of products for which FEM analyses have been used by the presenter so far is introduced by showing case examples and others.