A practical thermal model for the estimation of permanent magnet and stator winding temperatures

A thermal model for the determination of the temperatures of interior permanent magnets and stator windings is presented in this paper. The innovation of the model relies on one temperature sensor being located in the stator core of the machine. Such sensor is simple to implement in many applications such as traction or EV, where reliability is critical. The estimated stator winding and permanent magnet temperatures are determined by a simplified thermal lumped element network model with only two time constants. It is shown that the proposed thermal model is very robust due to the structure of the model and the measured stator core temperature. The distortion of the temperature estimates caused by the cooling circuit is inherently accounted for such that the model can be used for robust online prediction of temperatures. Experimental results based on a forced water-cooled interior permanent magnet synchronous machine setup are presented to validate the effectiveness of the presented model.