Editor’s Pick: Analyze Switched Reluctance Machines

By Anthony J. Lockwood

Today’s Editor’s Pick of the Week looks at Infolytica, the developer of CAE software for designing and analyzing electromechanical devices, induction heating machines, power electronics, sensors, industrial transformers, generators, and the like. It’s likely you know Infolytica for its MagNet electromagnetic field simulation software and its ElecNet 2/D/3D electric field simulation software. Today’s focus, however, is on its MotorSolve electric machines/motors design software suite.

I’ve wanted to write about MotorSolve since the beginning of the year when Infolytica announced MotorSolve Thermal, an add-on module for the MotorSolve toolset, but never got the chance. The delay ended up being fortuitous. The company just announced version 4 of MotorSolve, which introduces a key new analysis module called MotorSolve SRM (switched reluctance machine). I’ll get to that analyzer in a second.

I find MotorSolve interesting since it’s as fully automated an FEA tool as they come. It seems obvious that the developers strive to make you more productive by making it easy to use. The software doesn’t seem to make you fool around much with meshing or persnickety post-processing jobs like many apps do. Rather, it provides you ways to pick, choose, or simply enter what you need to do and then it does the heavy lifting.

In MotorSolve SRM, this philosophy takes the form of a template-based user interface. Using it, you can do things like edit rotor and stator geometries. You can also fill in all your specs and constraints, such as the number of rotor and stator poles, the outer diameter, firing angles, coil geometry, and lamination material.

The “what do you want to do?” approach goes further. Say you need a quick answer. MotorSolve SRM has a rapid static FEA solve feature that produces one. On the other end,  it has full time-stepping nonlinear FEA simulation capabilities for final design verification. Whether it’s report generation, winding configurations,  other computations, field plotting, etc., flexibility and automation seem to wind through MotorSolve SRM.

The MotorSolve v4 suite has been enhanced in other ways, especially vis-à-vis the thermal module. That’s all detailed from today’s Pick of the Week write-up and the links at the end. Make sure to hit the link on using MotorSolve SRM for traction applications. It’s an excellent read. You can also register for a trial edition. Finally, next Tuesday (9/25) there’s a complimentary webinar on SRM Design with MotorSolve v4 that sounds like a good show.

Thanks,  Pal. — Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood
Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering

Read today’s pick of the week write-up.

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