Abstract
Oriented steel has higher permeability and lower losses in the direction of orientation (the rolling direction) than non-oriented steel. However, in the transverse direction, oriented steel typically has lower permeability and higher losses. The strategic use of oriented steel in a modular Permanent Magnet Synchronous Machine (PMSM) stator can improve machine performance, particularly when compared to a machine designed with non-oriented steel, by increasing both torque and efficiency. Typically, steel manufacturers provide magnetic properties only in the rolling and transverse directions. Furthermore, in modern Finite Element Analysis (FEA) software, the magnetic properties between the rolling and transverse directions are interpolated using an intrinsic mathematical model. However, this interpolation method has proven to be inaccurate; to resolve this issue, an improved model was proposed in the literature. This model requires the magnetic properties of the oriented steel in between the rolling and transverse directions. Therefore, a procedure for extracting the magnetic properties of oriented steel is required. The objective of this work is to propose a method of determining the magnetic properties of oriented steel beyond just the oriented and transverse directions. In this method, flux-injecting probes, also known as sensors, are used to inject and control the flux density in an oriented steel segmented stator in order to extract the properties of the oriented steel. These extracted properties are then used to model an oriented steel modular stator PMSM. The machine’s average torque and core losses are compared with conventional, non-modular, non-oriented steel stator PMSM, and modular, non-oriented steel stator PMSM. It is shown that both the average torque and the core loss of the oriented steel modular stator PMSM have better performance at the selected number of segments than either of the two non-oriented steel stators.