Wind power as an abundant, clear, renewable energy resource has been attracting increasing

attention for solving problems arising from energy crisis and environmental pollution. Wind
power generation is a major method of utilizing this natural resource. Generally, it can be
classified as constant speed constant frequency (CSCF) wind power generation and variable speed
constant frequency (VSCF) wind power generation. In the CSCF system, the squirrel-cage induction
generator is usually equipped [60]. It offers several advantages, such as simple structure and high
robustness. It also can directly connect to power grid without any other power converter.
However, since the turbine speed is kept constant regardless of the variation of the wind speed,
the CSCF system suffers from very low efficiency and high mechanical stress. With the
development of power electronics, low cost power converters make it possible to produce
constant frequency electric power with variable turbine speed. The turbine speed changes along
with the wind speed to capture the maximum wind power. Thus, the efficiency of the VSCF system
is much higher. For the VSCF system, several types of generators have been adopted or proposed,
such as doubly fed induction generator [61], conventional synchronous generator [62], switched
reluctance machine [63], hybrid PM dc machine [64], [65], doubly salient PM machine [66], [67],
stator doubly fed doubly salient PM machine [68], and so on. In all above applications, mechanical
gearboxes are engaged to match the low speed of wind turbine and relatively high rotor speed of
generator. This will increase the cost of manufacture and maintenance, reduce efficiency and
robustness.
Recently, the directly-driven wind power PM generator for small-to-medium rating (up to 20 kW)
stand-alone battery system in remote areas has become more and more attractive [69]. Getting
rid of mechanical gearbox, the generator is directly driven by the wind turbine with low-speed
high-torque operation. That means the machine needs to have a bulky size with a very large pole
number.
Thanks to the application of high-energy PM materials such as neodymium-iron-boron, the volume
and manufacture cost of this type of machine can be dramatically reduced. In [70], an outer-rotor
PM generator was proposed.
With the turbine blades directly coupled onto the outer-rotor, the transmission efficiency is
further improved. Moreover, the outer-rotor with relatively bigger diameter is convenient for
accommodating multi-poles.
In order to be easily installed onto the tower, the machine applied to a stand-alone battery system
is required to have small size and light weight. For a certain power rating, the higher rotor
rotational speed implies lower electromagnetic torque. According to the electric machine design
principles, the electromagnetic torque is proportional to the volume of the machine. Hence,
improving the rated rotor speed could reduce the machine volume, thus, the weight and
manufacture cost. Recently, the concept of coaxial magnetic gear has been proposed [71].
Because of physical isolation between the input and output shafts, it offers some distinct
advantages: namely, minimum acoustic noise, free from maintenance, improved reliability, precise
peak torque transmission, and inherent overload protection. By adopting the coaxial topology, the
utilization of PMs on both the inner and outer rotors has been greatly improved. Thus, it can offer
high torque density comparable with the mechanical gearboxes, leading to be a unique device for
matching the low-speed wind turbine and the high-speed low-torque generator to further reduce
the overall size and weight.
The purpose of this chapter is to propose a magnetic-geared outer-rotor PM brushless machine for
wind power generation which incorporates the attractive features of outer-rotor PM generator
and magnetic gear. In Section 5.2, the configuration of a stand-alone wind-power generation
system and the machine design details considering special constraints of wind power generation
are introduced. Section 5.3 will be devoted to the finite element analysis for static characteristic of
the proposed machine. In Section 5.4, the mathematical modeling analysis of the proposed
machine is presented. Simulation and experimental results will be given to verify the validity of the
proposed machine in Section 5.5
Then comparisons between the proposed machine and its traditional counterparts are made in
Section 5.6. Finally, conclusion will be drawn in Section 5.7.

5.2 System Configuration and Machine Design Constraints
5.2.1 System Configuration
Figure 5.1 shows the configuration of a stand-alone wind-power generation system in remote
areas. It consists of the proposed PM generator to directly capture wind power, a three-phase
bridge rectifier to perform simple AC-DC conversion, a DC-DC converter to regulate the rectified
DC voltage, a battery pack for energy storage, and an inverter to perform simple DC-AC
conversion.

Figure
Figure 5.1 Stand-alone wind power generation system.

The detailed configuration of the proposed machine for wind power generation is shown in Figure
5.2. The coaxial magnetic gear is purposely integrated into the PM generator in such a way that
they can share the same high-speed PM rotor (namely, the outer-rotor of the PM generator and
the inner-rotor of the coaxial magnetic gear). Actually, this common rotor is designed like a cup
with PMs mounted on its inside and outside surfaces. The magnetic gear employs PMs on both the
inner-rotor and outer-rotor, and has a stationary ring between the two rotors. In order to provide
magnetic paths while reducing eddy current loss, the stationary ring is built of laminated
ferromagnetic materials.
Moreover, epoxy is filled in the slots of the stationary ring to enforce the structural strength for
high torque transmission. Both the gear inner-rotor and outer-rotor are supported by bearings on
the shafts to guarantee free rotations. For capturing wind power directly, the wind blades are
mounted on the gear outer-rotor. Figure 5.3 is the mechanical assembly plot (up-half).
5.2.2 Machine Design Constraints
As mentioned in Chapter 2, by defining p1, p2 as the pole-pair numbers of the outer-rotor and
inner-rotor respectively, and ns as the number of ferromagnetic pole-pieces on the stationary ring,
the operation of the magnetic gear can be given by:
5.1
5.2
where 1, 2 are the rotational speeds of the outer-rotor and inner-rotor respectively, and Gr is
so-called the gear ratio.

Equations (5.1) and (5.2) indicate that the gear ratio is determined by the pole-pair numbers of
both rotors. Thus, we should choose proper pole-pair numbers according to the wind turbine
speed and the expected generator rated speed. Based on the Betz theory [72], the mechanical
power extracted from wind power by the wind turbine can be expressed as


Where is the air density, vw the wind speed, A the swept area of wind-turbine rotor, and Cp is
called power conversion efficiency factor. This Cp is the function of the tip speed ratio , which is
defined as

where R is the radius of blades and the rotational speed of the wind turbine shaft. For the
proposed machine, it equals the gear outer-rotor speed 1. The characteristic of Cp= f ()
approximates to a parabola. When takes the specific value opt, the maximum power
conversion efficiency factor Cpmax occurs. In order to extract the maximum mechanical power,
1 should vary along with the wind speed. Figure 5.4 shows the power curve of some wind
turbine under different wind speeds. The maximum power curve indicated by a dotted line can be
expressed as:

Thus, the rated outer-rotor speed can be determined by the wind speed according to the power
curve. For an average wind speed of 7 m/s in some areas, from Figure 5.4, 1 should be rated as
136 rpm.
The gear inner-rotor, which is also the generator outer-rotor, is designed to have the rated speed
2 of 1000 rpm. Here we chose the number of pole-pairs on the gear outer-rotor as 22, the
number of pole-pairs on the gear inner-rotor as 3, and the number of stationary ferromagnetic
pole-pieces as 25. Consequently, the gear ratio of 22: 3 is resulted to match the rated speeds of
the rotors.


Considering the power generation under gentle breeze, the reduction of starting torque is another
major design goal. In PM machines, cogging torque is a major factor which contributes to high
starting torque and deteriorates the low-speed operation. In general, the cogging torque can be
expressed in Taylor series form [73]

where the fundamental order Nc is the smallest common multiple between the stator slot number
Qs and the rotor pole number 2P, the mechanical angle between the stator and the rotor, and
Ksk the skew factor. Skewed slot design will complicate the manufacture as well as produce
sinusoidal electrical waveforms. It has been known that when the electromagnetic loads are held
constant, the square wave generator can produce about 10 % more power output than the
sinusoidal one [74]. Out of these considerations, skewing has not been adopted so that Ksk equals
1 for the proposed machine.
Two machines with exactly the same sizes but different number of stator slots equal to 9 and 27
are selected for analysis. Since the inner-rotor pole number is 6, the fundamental order of the
cogging torque existing in the former machine is 18 and that in the latter machine is 54. The higher
the fundamental order, the lower the harmonic magnitude is resulted. Figure 5.5 gives the cogging
torque waveforms calculated by FEM. The magnitude of the cogging torque in the machine with
27 slots is about 0.7 Nm which is much less than 2 Nm in the machine with 9 slots. More slots are
helpful to reduce cogging torque; however, leading to increase manufacture complexity as well as
the whole size of the system. To make a tradeoff, 27 stator slots are chosen. Figure 5.6 illustrates
the stator winding connection. The three-phase symmetric windings consist of 27 double-layer
coils. Each coil span covers 5 slot pitches while the pole pitch is 9/2 of the slot pitch.