A new oval shaft, high performance, 2 pole line start synchronous reluctance machine for submersible pump applications

Abstract

In this paper, a 2 pole, 4 kW, 6 inches diameter line start synchronous reluctance machine (LS-SynRM) as a submersible water pump motor is designed and optimized with a new oval shaft structure. The aim is to improve the machine performance by widening the flux path on the rotor via narrowing down the shaft on the q-axis. This way a wider d-axis flux path is obtained, and accordingly, the d-axis inductance, the saliency ratio Ld∕Lq, and the inductance difference Ld–Lq are increased. First, a set of structural analyses is carried out on a 7-flux barrier rotor in 3 stages: modal, harmonic, and static structural analyses. According to analysis results, the safe limit for the shaft size reduction is determined as 8 mm to avoid excessive deformations and undesired vibrations due to resonance. Later, the machine is optimized using Multi-Objective Differential Evolution (MODE) algorithm with a narrower shaft. The quality of the Pareto front solutions shows that the oval shaft machine is superior to the circular shaft machine in terms of efficiency, motor mass, and torque ripple. The maximum recorded efficiency improvement for the same size LS-SynRM is 4 points and the same size commercial induction machine is around 20 points.