Water Cold Plates Cooling in a Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor

This paper presents a new water cooling system applied in a permanent magnet synchronous motor. This system is inspired by a widely used concept in electronics cooling. It consists of implementing some cold plates in the magnetic core. A lot of experimental tests have been carried out to evaluate the thermal performance of this cooling process and to estimate the influent parameters, such as ambient environment, flow rate, pressure stack, and distance between cold plates. Numerical approach based on computational fluid dynamics and finite elements method has been carried out to study the flow structure and the temperature distribution. Regarding the numerical results compared to the experimental results, it is noticed how much the flow structure has a significant influence on the overall thermal performance of this cooling design.