Cooling systems for future motor technologies in electric aircrafts

电动飞机推进有望减少飞行对环境的影响，但为了使其可行，相关技术需要进行重大改进。该项目将主要关注先进的冷却技术的研究，这将使东芝正在开发的新的和创新的电机技术的使用。高速电机是电动汽车电机应用发展的主要焦点之一，由于它们可以实现高功率密度特性，但随之而来的是更高的损耗密度，导致温度升高和效率损失。这带来了与机器的热管理相关的非常重要的挑战-随着温度的升高，需要从机械系统中移除更多的热量。该项目将对目前存在的冷却方法进行彻底调查，并将努力评估这些现有方法的性能，能力和可行性，以及这些新的和创新的电机技术，东芝正在设计和开发这些技术，以进一步用于航空航天推进应用。除了对这些当前冷却技术的分析外，该项目的范围还将深入研究地球仪的科学家和工程师正在开发的更多非传统方法的使用。同样，这些方法将根据其与正在开发的这些新设计的电机一起使用的潜力进行评估，审查其性能，能力和可行性，并将其与传统方法进行比较。电机冷却领域的研究有多种途径，对于这些传统方法，拓扑结构和冷却技术被相当好地定义-主要包括空气冷却，水冷却和油冷却，这些不同类型的传统冷却可以进一步分解成更具体的拓扑结构和方法。如前所述，有一些非传统的、更新的冷却技术概念，其中有广泛的潜在研究途径，这些途径以前从未被探索过。这些新概念的一些例子如下：超导体绕组及其相关的冷却方法，热管在电机中的使用，相变冷却和许多其他。在该项目中，有研究这些冷却技术的一些基本领域的范围，包括但不限于：材料选择及其性能，冷却系统组件和材料的制造以及冷却系统的机械设计。有很多方法可用于分析这些冷却系统及其有效性，使用各种数值建模和实验方法，并有可能使用高度复杂的计算软件，如“计算流体动力学”。在项目的现阶段，尚未完全确定哪种电机冷却技术将是主要焦点，然而，有大量的潜在路线有待研究，具有很大的理论和实验研究潜力。由于其中许多技术尚未完全理解，对其中一些领域的研究将在不久的将来对推动全电动飞机非常有利。

Electric aircraft propulsion promises to reduce the environmental impacts of flight, however in order for these to viable, significant improvements are needed in the associated technology. This project will focus primarily on the investigation of advanced cooling technologies which will enable the use of new and innovative motor technologies being developed by Toshiba.High-speed electrical machines are one of the primary focuses in the evolution of electrical machine applications of electric vehicles, due to the high power density characteristics they can enable, but with this comes higher loss densities in the machines, resulting in an increase in temperature and a loss of efficiency. This brings about a very important challenge associated with the thermal management of the machine - with an increase in temperature, the requirement for more heat to be removed from the mechanical system is increased. This project will perform a thorough investigation into the current methods of cooling which currently exist, and will endeavour to assess the performance, capability and viability of these already existing methods in conjunction with these new and innovative motor technologies, in which Toshiba are in the process of designing and developing for potential further use in aerospace propulsion applications. As well as an analysis of these current cooling technologies, the scope of this project will dig deeper into the use of more unconventional methods, which are being developed by scientists and engineers across the globe. Again, these methods will be assessed in terms of their potential for use alongside these new designs of motors being developed, with their performance, capability and viability scrutinised and their effectiveness compared with conventional methods.There are a multitude of avenues for research into the field of cooling for electric machines, with the topologies and cooling techniques fairly well defined for these conventional methods - primarily involving air cooling, water cooling and oil cooling, these different types of conventional cooling can be further broken down into more specific topologies and methods. As previously mentioned, there are unconventional, newer concepts of cooling technologies where there is a wide range of potential avenues for research which has previously been unexplored. Some examples of these new concepts are as following: Superconductor windings and their associated cooling methods, the use of heat pipes in an electric machine, phase change cooling and many others. Within this project there is the scope for research into a number of fundamental areas of these cooling technologies, including but not limited to: material selection and their performance, manufacturing of the cooling system components and materials and the mechanical design of the cooling systems. There are lots of methods to be used to analyse these cooling systems and their effectiveness, using a variety of numerical modelling and experimental methods, with the potential for the use of highly complex computational software such as 'computational fluid dynamics'.At this stage of the project, it is not yet fully defined which avenue of electric machine cooling technologies will be the primary focus, however there are a significant number of potential routes to be investigated, with lots of potential for theoretical and experimental research. With many of these technologies not yet fully understood, research into some of these areas would be massively advantageous for the push to fully electric aircraft in the near future.