Sustainable Design and LCA of non-RE PMSynRM with Bioplastic Rotor Shroud

Paper in proceeding, 2022

The electric vehicle components should be audited from manufacturing to disposal to be aligned with the United Nations sustainable development goals. The electrical machines without rare-earth (RE) magnets will assure a much lower environmental impact. Non-RE designs will also reduce the cost and weight of the motor with a penalty on the performance. One of the most prominent non-RE magnet motor designs is the Synchronous Reluctance Motor (SynRM), where the rotor anisotropy is assured via flux barriers in the rotor quadrature direction. Held in place via iron bridges (aka. ribs), flux barriers will, in turn, impact the rotor saliency. As a remedy, the paper will report on a novel ribless rotor design accommodating bioplastic for the rotor structure design. The bioplastic rotor ribless machine will be compared to various state-of-The-Art electrical machine concept designs on their merit on sustainability, performance, structural integrity, and the active parts packaging volume. The electrical machine designs are also presented with ferrite magnets to enhance the specific torque. Finally, rib less ferrite assisted SynRM rotor will be further optimized in material choice to arrive at a design solution with minimized environmental impact. As a guideline, the total CO2 impact of this paper is also quantified in a separate section.