Design of a High-Speed Permanent Magnet Motor for the Drive of a Fuel Cell Air-Compressor

Abstract

International audienceThis paper deals with the design of a 500 W permanent magnet (PM) machine used to drive the aircompressor of a 5 kW fuel cell (FC). The authors focus on the optimization of the motor efficiency in order to minimize the energy consumption of the air-compressor which can represent up to 30 % of the electrical energy delivered by the FC. The authors justify the use of a PM machine by the fact that, by using rare earth Nd-Fe-B magnets, such a type of machine makes it possible to reach a high efficiency as well as a high power density. The optimized machine presented in this paper have theoretically more than 25 % of its working area with an efficiency higher than 90 % and the efficiency at the rated point equals to 92 %. Those promising results of computation are confirmed by the first experimental results obtained with a prototype