Elevating stability & efficiency for advanced parametric hairpin stator designs

The design of electric motors is currently facing several critical challenges. Firstly, there is a pressing need to reduce the length and weight of e-motors due to very limited packaging. Secondly, the efficiency of e-drives is heavily influenced by stator winding, necessitating a reduction in losses within the copper.

Additionally, there are complexities in design, particularly at the intersection points and in connecting to the power electronics, which demand geometric feasibility. Designing the winding head presents its own set of difficulties due to the electrical winding scheme and the need for a non-symmetric solution. This complexity is further compounded as hairpin windings must navigate through narrow areas crowded with other windings for connection.

Today's product development processes exacerbate these challenges. Typically, these processes run sequentially in consecutive steps, starting with the specification of requirements and proceeding through design, evaluation, optimization, and production planning. However, these steps are often not well connected, and experts from different disciplines tend to work independently with a disconnected tool stack.

The manual description of components, surface by surface, radius by radius, in CAD software is a time-consuming task. Furthermore, the parameterization capabilities of today's CAD tools are limited, making it difficult to implement complex geometrical dependencies and fundamental geometry changes. This often results in unstable models that are prone to failure when subjected to changes and updates. The need for constant reaction to new results and changing boundary conditions requires a high level of manual effort from designers. Consequently, the process becomes lengthy and cost-intensive due to manual design and simulation steps, often yielding only a limited number of results.