Design optimization of a permanent magnet synchronous motor by the response surface methodology

This article proposes an effective computational approach to design optimization of an outer-rotor type permanent magnet synchronous motor. As usual, because of the complicated rotor configuration and the complex magnetic saturation effects, it is difficult to design the lightweight permanent magnet synchronous motor structure that makes good use of reluctance torque within an acceptable CPU time. In this article, we adopt the finite element method as a magnetic field analysis method and the genetic algorithms as a search method. Furthermore, the response surface methodology, which enables us to evaluate the objective physical quantities in a much shorter time, is introduced into the above methods in the proposed approach. This optimization approach results in an overall increase in the optimization speed, that is, substantial CPU time reduction in comparison with the case of a conventional one. Some numerical results that demonstrate the validity of the proposed approach are also presented. (C) 2002 American Institute of Physics.