Aerodynamic Design of Cooling Guide for Electrical Machine in Electric Ducted Fan

Abstract

Electric ducted fan has newly emerged as the most compact type of propulsion fan for flying cars, because of its flexible configuration arrangement, low noise level and high safety level operation. Typically, an electric ducted fan is composed of a hub-driven fan and a hub-mounted inner rotor electrical machine. The thermal management of the hub-mounted electrical machine is essential because it determines the machine's continuous output power and reliability, as well as the fan thrust force. The heat transmitted from the stator winding to the cooling guide vane (CGV) is dissipated by introducing the air flow at hub region to the CGV. Therefore, in order to better improve the thermal performance of the CGV, an aerodynamic design of CGV is proposed in this paper for better thermal management of stator end-windings. First, for a certain desired power output of electrical machine under temperature constraints of stator winding, lumped thermal network is established to derive the requirement of heat transfer coefficients of the CGV. Then, from engineering feasibility, three different CGVs including straight type, arc-shape type and airfoil-shape type are tested by computational fluid dynamics. The evaluation of the CGV designs include the flow characteristics, power requirements, and thermal characteristics for stator winding cooling purposes. In comparison with the conventionally straight type CGV, improvements are gained from the designed arc-shape type and airfoil-shape type cooling configurations, whereas the fan thrust force remains the same simultaneously. It is verified that the arc-shape type and airfoil-shape type CGVs are promising in enhancing the thermal management performance of the electrical machine stator winding without power requirement.