Advanced Transient Thermal Modeling of Traction Motors in COMSOL

This thesis deals with study and thermal analysis of electric motors for high-performance applications, where focus is placed on electric traction motors for e-mobility and railway applications. Calculations are done in COMSOL, a simulation software for Fluid Dynamic Computational calculation. The thesis can be divided in five main topics. In the first chapter, focus is on different cooling layouts for electric motor, operating conditions of traction motor and finally different thermal modelling methods. At the chapter 2, numerical modelling of cooling flow is presented. First an introduction is given on different Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) methods including finite element and finite volume. The second part of this chapter focuses on the geometry building with which I worked in COMSOL, with exhaustive explanation about main functions. Subsequently, calculation solvers and mesh setups are elaborated. Finally, flow results are presented. Chapter 3 is reserved to the presentation and discussion of the developed CFD model to calculate the air flow in the motor as input for the complete thermal model.?? At the chapter 4, traction motor model is presented and temperature results obtained from thermal simulations are discussed.?? In chapter 5, the experimental setup is outlined and a comparison between simulation and measurements results is presented. Conclusions and future works and references in chapter 6 and 7 are respectively discussed.