Energy Efficiency in Electric Devices, Machines and Drives

This Special Issue deals with improvements in the energy efficiency of electric devices, machines, and drives, which are achieved through improvements in the design, modelling, control, and operation of the system. Properly sized and placed coils of a welding transformer can reduce the required iron core size and improve the efficiency of the welding system operation. New structures of the single-phase field excited flux switching machine improve its performance in terms of torque, while having higher back-EMF and unbalanced electromagnetic forces. A properly designed rotor notch reduces the torque ripple and cogging torque of interior permanent magnet motors for the drive platform of electric vehicles, resulting in lower vibrations and noise. In the field of modelling, the torque estimation of a Halbach array surface permanent magnet motor with a non-overlapping winding layout was improved by introducing an analytical two-dimensional subdomain model. A general method for determining the magnetically nonlinear two-axis dynamic models of rotary and linear synchronous reluctance machines and synchronous permanent magnet machines is introduced that considers the effects of slotting, mutual interaction between the slots and permanent magnets, saturation, cross saturation, and end effects. Advanced modern control solutions, such as neural network-based model reference adaptive control, fuzzy control, senseless control, torque/speed tracking control derived from the 3D non-holonomic integrator, including drift terms, maximum torque per ampere, and maximum efficiency characteristics, are applied to improve drive performance and overall system operation.