Scaling effect on inter-turn short-circuit fault of PM machines for wind power application

This paper proposes a general analytical model of surface-mounted permanent magnet (SPM) machines with series-connected coils under inter-turn short circuit (ITSC) fault. One prominent feature of this fault model is that the air-gap and slot-leakage components of inductances under fault are calculated separately, and the influences of pole number and spatial distribution of coils have been considered in the calculations. In the model, the winding function approach (WFA) is used to calculate the air-gap inductance components by considering all space harmonics whilst slot-leakage inductance components are obtained by using slot permeance method. The proposed fault model built in Matlab/Simulink is validated by time stepping FE simulations for a 3kW 96-slot 32-pole SPM machine. The fault model has acceptable accuracy and is suitable for the fast evaluation of fault performance of SPM machines and its accuracy considering core saturation can be improved using FE-based results. Other power ratings (0.5MW and 3MW) have also been investigated to study the scaling effect on machine fault-tolerant capability. A 12-slot 4-pole small scale prototype has been built to validate the developed fault models.