What's new in Altair® FluxMotor® 2024 ?
Altair EmployeeAltair FluxMotor 2024
Efficiency maps are crucial to evaluate the performance of electric machines and to be able to measure how efficient they are over various driving cycles. FluxMotor is providing automated computations of such maps using optimized procedure to get it done in a very fast way. In the 2024 version, you’ll find many enhancements for efficiency maps bringing interesting gains in precision. As for many other simulations in FluxMotor, you have several options you can choose from to get the best compromise between speed and accuracy. Let’s discover now what’s more in the version!
FAST CHARACTERIZATION OF WOUND FIELD MACHINES
In a search of electric motors without rare-earth permanent magnets, the option of using wound field synchronous machines is becoming more popular. The previous version of FluxMotor was already giving the possibility to create such machines in a few clicks. Version 2024 offers fully automated tests, to characterize the machine performance at a specific working point, to get full mapping in the d-q space for a given field current and position, or to produce efficiency maps. In addition, a transient model can be exported to perform short-circuit analysis in Flux.
New working point analysis for wound field machines. Several options offered depending on the level of accuracy required
EFFICIENCY MAPS WITH THE BEST COMPROMISE BETWEEN SPEED AND ACCURACY
FluxMotor efficiency maps calculations can be really fast, just a few minutes! To be able to achieve this speed, the calculations are based on finite-element magnetostatic computations that provide maps characterizing the magnetic behavior of the machine versus Id and Iq. To accelerate the creation of those maps, you can distribute the computations on multiple cores. Once the maps have been produced, the second step is to compute the efficiency in the torque-speed plane using optimization procedures, which will depend on the way the motor is controlled. If you want to change the control parameter part only, you don’t need to compute the Id-Iq maps again. In the new version, the user has the possibility to re-use existing ones, hence reducing significantly the time needed to generate a new efficiency map. Another option that is now offered is to include the position as an input of the maps, in addition to Id and Iq. This brings more accuracy to the evaluation of the magnetic performance and of iron losses. There is obviously a price to pay in terms of time to get a high level of precision, but it remains much lower than running full transient computations.
Wound field machine efficiency map taking into account rotor position dependency for high accuracy results
GO FURTHER IN THERMAL ANALYSIS
Thermal performance is an essential part of the design of an electric machine. For fast predictions of temperature distributions, FluxMotor is using 1D thermal networks that are automatically generated from the machine description. Altair® Flow SimulatorTM is an advanced tool that provides accurate flow and thermal network modeling capabilities. You can now export the FluxMotor model to Flow Simulator. You will then be able to view the thermal network and add new elements to it for enhanced flow and thermal simulation. You can then go deeper in the cooling optimization of your motor or generator.
1D thermal model exported to Altair Flow Simulator for advanced flow and thermal simulations
Among other improvements brought by the 2024 version, a new way of exporting and importing parts and motors have been introduced to let you share models with other colleagues in an easy way. Want to know more ?
Get all the details in the Release Notes [Link].
If you want to learn also about Flux and its new features, follow this [Link]
Enjoy the new version !
#OnlyForward
Fabrice Marion - Senior Program Manager - FluxMotor®
Vincent Leconte - Senior Director Electrification Solutions