A Hybrid Approach for Stator Winding Design Optimization

Large electrical machines (e.g. hydro generators or motors for mining applications) are typically designed and built specifically for their site of installation. Engineering these one-of-a-kind designs requires a considerable amount of time and effort, with no guarantees that the final blueprint is cost-optimal. One part of the design involves the stator windings, i.e. the static part of an electric motor generating an electromagnetical field. In order to achieve low harmonic losses during operation, fractional windings are preferred, where the number of slots per phase in the stator is not a multiple of the number of poles. This renders the layout of the stator winding a challenging combinatorial optimization problem. The paper proposes a decomposition approach in which the problem can be reformulated as a rich variant of the Travelling Salesman Problem in which both MIP and CP are employed to tackle the problem.