Design and construction of an outer-rotor PM synchronous generator for small wind turbines; comparing real results with those of FE model

The purpose of this paper is to get a contrasted flexible model in order to analyze and design an outer-rotor permanent magnet (PM) generator for directly-coupled wind turbine applications, improving the previous prototype that was designed, built and verified two years ago. A finite element analysis package program called FLUX 2D and 2D skewed has been used to design and analyze the PM generator. The 3D application was used too in order to contrast results between different applications and real results obtained in the recently built second prototype. But it should be remarked that the 3D needs a very large computer time. Anyway, all of them allow predicting inaccurate design, saving time of test bench, and that way, they make possible to rich a prototype successfully. Skewed tools have been very useful, and complemented with classic formulation adapted for the prototype, are suitable for the treatment of sloping grooves, becoming really useful the utilization of the software. Given the flexibility of the aforementioned package, it's also possible the intercommunication with such a powerful tools as MATLAB-SIMULINK and others finite element packages.