Integrated Electrical Machine-Turbo Machinery

Global warming and climate change due to rising levels of greenhouse gases have placed significant pressure on the automobile industry to adopt more clean fuel, transportation electrification, and waste energy recovery technologies. As a result, several electrically assisted or driven turbo-machines have been proposed such as turbochargers, turbo-compressors, and electrical boosters. Therefore, the electrification of turbo-machinery has been trending for the past decade. All the systems mentioned above consist of a conventional electrical machine connected to the turbo-machinery by a shaft, making the system relatively large, heavy, costly and mechanically complex. In this paper, an integrated electrical machine-turbo machinery concept is proposed. It consists of an electrical machine mounted around a salient rotor that is shaped like an axial flow turbo-machinery wheel. The electrical machine can be used as a motor to drive or assist the operation of the turbo-machine or it can operate as a generator powered by the gas or fluid flow. Compared to the conventional electrically derived or assisted turbo-machine systems, the proposed system is expected to decrease the overall size, weight and complexity. In order to illustrate this concept, an initial multi-physics feasibility study is presented. Electromagnetic and mechanical, performance are calculated and investigated using FEA. Additionally, aerodynamic consideration has been illustrated.