Consequent-Pole Hybrid Brushless Wound-Rotor Synchronous Machine

Abstract

Several brushless topologies for wound rotor synchronous machines (WRSMs) have been presented in recent years to replace the brushes and slip-ring assembly in conventional WRSMs [1–4]. The brushless operation of the WRSM presents these machines as an alternative to the permanent magnet synchronous machines (PMSMs) because of their low cost and competitive performance as compared to the PMSMs. However, the drawback of the brushless wound rotor synchronous machines (BL-WRSMs) is their low starting torque because of the absence of the excitation source on their rotor. Although, the BL-WRSM achieves the rated torque at the base speed but low starting torque under the base speed makes these machines less suitable for variable speed applications. A PM assisted BL-WRSM was presented in [5] to overcome the problem of the low starting torque and to provide better performance under full-load conditions. However, the presence of the PM on each pole increases the cost of the machine. Moreover, the leakage flux is increased in PM assisted machines. These issues can be resolved by the consequent pole (CP) machines [6]. In this paper, a consequent pole hybrid brushless wound rotor synchronous machine (CPH-BLWRSM) is proposed to overcome the problem of low starting torque, and to reduce the PM usage as compared to the PM assisted machines. A 2-D finite element analysis is performed to validate the proposed CPH-BL-WRSM and its performance is compared with the existing BL-WRSM and PM assisted BL-WRSM.