Torque Ripple Reduction in Reluctance Synchronous Machines

using an Asymmetric Rotor Structure

Tobias Lange, Burin Kerdsup, Claude Weiss, Rik W. De Doncker
Institute for Power Electronics and Electrical Drives (ISEA), RWTH Aachen University, Germany.

Keywords: Torque Ripple Reduction, Asymmetric Rotor

Structure, Reluctance Synchronous Machine, Flux Barrier
Placement

because of the skewing and thus active ux and torque is lost.

An alternative was published by [3], where an asymmetrical
arrangement of the barrier ends and the stator teeth results in a
reduction of the overall torque ripple. To avoid mechanical imbalance, the rotor core lamination is rotated by one pole arc for
each layer. Superposition of the torque harmonics is achieved
which reduces the torque ripple. In [4] a combination of two
rotor layouts stacked to one rotor called Romeo and Julia design was presented. Furthermore, a combination of two different barrier designs within one rotor layout called Machaon design was proposed and evaluated in [5]. Both methods achieve
good results, but also reduced the average torque of the machine.

Abstract
Reluctance Synchronous Motors combine high efciency and
high torque density in a limited speed range. This type of machine is increasingly becoming an alternative to Induction Machines, especially for pumps and industrial drives. However,
the torque ripple of RSM, caused by the spatial variation of
the machine ux and reluctance, needs to be considered during the design process. This paper presents an approach of
torque ripple reduction using asymmetric ux barrier angles
and a ipped rotor structure to compensate certain torque harmonics by superposition. With the described design process,
the resulting torque ripple is strongly reduced without loosing
average torque.

This section presents the design process starting with a common machine design and completing with the ux barrier angle
optimization for torque ripple reduction. The torque ripple reduction method is performed after a draft design, evaluation
and geometry adaption, followed by a detailed FEA optimization of the machine as shown in Fig. 1.

Introduction

In the scope of the german national funded research project

Lufo4 KONKRET, Reluctance Synchronous Machines (RSM)
have been considered as a viable alternative to Induction Machines (IM). Several publications, such as [1] and [2], showed
a higher torque density or higher efciency of RSMs compared to induction machines. Due to continiously decreasing
power electronic costs, the increased reactive power consumption of reluctance synchronous machines can easily be delivered. The slotted stator and rotor structure of machines causes
a non sinusoidal ux distribution over the stators circumference. Stator slots and rotor teeth interact and produce spatial
ux harmonics, which result in torque ripple. The torque ripple
of the RSM is comparably high, if no further steps for improvement are taken. In this paper a design method for torque ripple
reduction by ux barrier angle adaption is proposed.

Design Process

Overview of Ripple Reduction

Different methods for torque ripple reduction such as skewing

of the rotor or asymmetric barriers over the mechanical circumference are known. Skewing offers good results regarding the
torque ripple, but it also reduces average torque. The optimal
magnetic eld vector can not be applied over the stacklength,

Fig. 1: Machine design process for torque ripple reduction

The detailed machine design is completed without considera-

tion of the torque ripple. Thereafter, the rotor barrier angles

are adapted and varied to obtain the lowest torque ripple. After
choosing the best machine design with asymmetric ux barriers, small improvements can be carried out to nalize the machine design.
3.1

Geometry Design

The machine design begins with the electric and mechanical

specication and the denition of the dimensional limits. The
design procedure starts with the draft machine design based
on the software for machine design PC-BDC from SPEED
[6] coupled with the nite element analysis SPEED-FEA. The
coupled simulation ensures that saturation effects are considered during the rst design step. The simulation is repeated
with different machine geometry parameters and winding congurations until the desired design demands are met. During
the design variations several barrier shapes and positions, as
well as stator tooth and winding congurations are considered.
Depending on the specication and optimization criteria, such
as high power density or efciency, the machines are evaluated
and validated to complete the draft design. The draft design
process is followed by a detailed investigation of the machine
in a further nite element analysis. As the saturation effects
had already been taken into account, the results of the draft
design and the detailed FE-analysis match well. Nevertheless,
a further analysis and detailed consideration of the magnetic
properties is necessary to gain the best motor performance.
The torque ripple of the machine was not considered during
the predesign, but will be regarded in the next section.
3.2

Fig. 2: Rotor with symmetric ux barrier angles of the example machine

tions can be used to nd a good starting point for a detailed
calculation. The stator slot pitch Stator depends on the Stator slot number NStatorslot :
Stator =

360
NStatorslot

(1)

It is desired to compensate the components of the stator slot

harmonic in the magnetic ux and the resulting torque. Thus
the adaption of the barrier angles can be limited within one
stator slot pitch to gain the best results. The example shown
in Fig. 3 assumes a 4 pole motor with a symmetric angle
symmetric of 135 .

Optimization of Barrier Angles

The primary goal of all torque ripple optimizations is to eliminate or compensate the ux harmonic effects in the machine.
The ux harmonics are caused by the discrete stator teeth and
slots as well as the rotor teeth of the reluctance motor. As
mentioned in section 2 different methods for torque ripple reduction have been proposed in literature. This paper presents a
method where variing the barrier angles leads to a phase shift
of the ux harmonics. Especially the mechanical point symmetry is not lost and mechanical imbalance of the rotor can
be avoided. The proposed method eliminates the stator slot
harmonics signicantly with the help of superposition without
loosing motor performance.

1,max = symmetric + Stator

(2)

(3)
2,min = symmetric Stator
|1 2 |
Stator
(4)
2
The exact barrier angle needs to be determined by detailed nite element calculations considering the magnetic saturation
and the current angle of the preferred operating point. Especially the placement of the ux barriers within the rotor inuences the resulting angle values. If multiple ux barriers
are used, the inner and outer barriers are kept parallel to each
other. Thereby the leading ux path and saturation behaviour
of the machine is kept nearly constant. The resulting front view
of the example machine with two rotor segments is shown in
Fig. 4 on the left.

Assuming a 4 pole machine and starting with a barrier angle

of 135 as shown in Fig. 2 the barrier angle is increased on
the left and decreased on the right side of the magnetic pole.
Afterwards, one rotor half is ipped by 180 and stacked back
onto the rotor shaft as shown in Fig. 3 and 4. Flipping the rotor
layout leads to a phase shift of the ux and torque harmonic
component with the opposite sign. With this knowledge the
rotor barrier angles can be adapted to reach the target of 180
phase shift of the slot harmonic between the adapted rotor and
the adapted ipped rotor. To determine the adaption range of
the rotor barrier angles 1 and 2 in Fig. 3, the following equa-

Results

In this section the method for torque ripple reduction is shown

in detail. At the beginning two machines with a rated torque of

12 Nm is shown in Fig. 5, which contains the contour curves

of equal torque ripple. The ripple amplitude is given in percentage values of the rated rotor torque. It is shown that a the
ripple can be reduced to less than 10 % of the average rated
torque. A further improvement would be possible by loosing
average torque. However, in this design process the average
torque reduction was limited to 6 %.

Fig. 3: Rotor with asymmetric ux barrier angles

Fig. 5: Torque ripple as a function of the barrier angles for the

24 slot machine
Choosing the barrier angles 1 = 143 and 2 = 122 for
the minimum torque ripple of 8.7 %, the simulated torque over
one rotor pole pitch of 90 is shown in Fig. 6. The upper gure
shows torque ripple of the original rotor without asymmetric
barrier angles. The middle gure shows the torque of each
segment as a solid line and for the ipped rotor segment with
the dashed line. The superposition of the asymmtric rotor is
plotted in the lower gure with the solid line and the average
torque as a dotted line.

Fig. 4: Stacking of asymmetric rotor segments

12 Nm, 4 poles with 4 ux barriers, 24 slot and 36 slot stator

conguration are designed as described in section 3.1. Now
the torque ripple reduction method using angle adaption is carried out for the 24 and 36 slot machines. During the proposed
process for torque ripple reduction, the rotor structures shown
on the left in Fig. 7 and Fig. 10 are investigated. The barrier angles of the 24 slot machine are adapted in the range of
Stator = 15 and the barrier angles of the 36 slot machine
are in the range of Stator = 10 . It is remarkable that
the total torque ripple is not just dependent on the geometric
positioning of the rotor and stator teeth, but also on the current control angle and the magnetic saturation within the machine. Here the rated operating point is chosen to evaluate the
machine performance. However, higher harmonics of the rotor and stator slots also occur as torque ripple amplitudes, if
the harmonic component with the order of the slot number is
perfectly compensated. The nal rotor structure needs to be
considered in a detailed nite element design process to improve the nal details. Small modications to the ux barriers, keeping the previously determined barrier angles constant,
complete the motor design. To evaluate each machine design
the torque ripple is calculated for each barrier angle combination of 1 and 2 as shown in Fig. 5 and Fig. 8.

Fig. 6: Torque ripple of the 24 slot motor over rotor angle in

degrees
The geometric layout of the motor is shown in Fig. 7. The
left gure shows the machine layout before the torque ripple
reduction process and the right gure shows the motor with

The result of the 24 slot motor operated at rated torque of

Fig. 7: Initial and nal rotor design of the 24 slot machine

one adapted rotor segment after applying the ripple reduction
method.

Fig. 9: Torque ripple of the 36 slot motor over rotor angle in

degrees

Secondly, the method is evaluated for a 36 slot machine with

identical specications. The machine is operated at rated
torque. The calculated torque ripple plane is shown in Fig. 8.
The non optimized machine has a torque ripple of 14.8 % at
12.3 Nm rated torque. Generally the torque ripple amplitude
of a 36 slot machine is smaller compared to a 24 slot machine,
thus the expected torque ripple reduction is larger than for a 24
slot motor.

Fig. 10: Initial and nal rotor design of the 36 slot machine
age torque can be noted. The torque characteristics of both
machines before and after applying the proposed method of
ripple reduction are listed and compared in Table 1.
Torig,avg
Torig,ripple
Tavg
Tripple

24 slot machine
12.9 Nm
2.9 Nm
12.13 Nm
1.1 Nm

36 slot machine
12.4 Nm
1.8 Nm
12.1 Nm
0.2 Nm

Table 1: Average torque and torque ripple of the considered

24 slot and 36 slot motor.

Fig. 8: Torque ripple as a function of the barrier angles for the

36 slot machine
Again, the average torque reduction is limited to 6% of the
rated torque. From Fig. 8 the angles for minimum torque ripple
at 1 = 140.6 and 2 = 127.5 are chosen for the resulting
rotor structure in Fig. 10. With the 36 slot machine, the torque
ripple is reduced to 1.5 %. The torque versus rotor pole pitch
of 90 is shown in Fig. 9.

Conclusion

In reluctance synchronous motors the stator and rotor ux

harmonics lead to a signicant torque ripple at the machine
shaft. This ripple is caused by spatial ux harmonics which
are strongly dependent on the machine geometry. In this paper a method for torque ripple reduction of RSMs has been
proposed. After a common machine design process the torque
ripple reduction process has been carried out. The method is
based on superpostion of rotor segments and requires one rotor layout and cut, which is ipped during the production process. Additionally, the average torque can be kept constant,

The ux barrier angle adaption causes the ux paths change

minimally. Small modications to improve the magnetic design should be considered in a nal design step as mentioned
before.
Comparing the results of the two proposed motors with 24 slots
and 36 slots, a signicant improvement without loosing aver-

while the torque ripple is reduced signicantly. Furthermore,

the mechanical balance of the rotor is maintained, because the
ux barrier angle adaption leads to a point symmetric structure.
The method has been shown for two different machines with a
24 and 36 slot stator with distributed windings. The proposed
design process has been veried by a detailed nite element
simulation.
The project underlying this report was funded by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology, project number
20Y0906A. The responsibility for the content of this publication lies with the author.

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