Plenary lecture 2: minimum energy for an improved environment: electrical machine design and control for the future

This paper presents a vision for the future design of electrical machines and the systems in which they are employed with a view to achieving a contribution to the overall energy consumption minimisation throughout industry. For example, developments in rare earth magnetic materials have enabled new designs of high power density, high efficiency machines. Computationally demanding design techniques such as finite elements and genetic algorithms are becoming practicable with advances in software and digital processors. This is enabling the progress of more sophisticated machine designs with special rotor and stator geometries yielding optimal flux paths, high torque and minimal ripple outputs. To achieve the aforementioned energy consumption minimisation, not only is the electrical machine design important but also the consideration of the energy losses in the systems employing the electrical machines. Automatic control will play an increasingly important role in this regard. Optimal control strategies, especially those involving nonlinearities, are of an open loop structure and hitherto have been largely of academic interest in view of their sensitivities to parametric errors and external disturbances. Advances in easily attained computational power, however, are enabling practicable closed loop versions of these optimal controls that overcome these limitations to be created, with the aid of artificial intelligence. This paper includes several applications in which combined electrical machine design for maximum efficiency and system design for minimum energy usage is of paramount importance.