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Induction machines (IM) are considered work horse for industrial applications due to their rugged, reliable and inexpensive nature; however, their low power density restricts their use in volume and weight limited environments such as an aerospace, traction and propulsion applications. Given recent advancements in additive manufacturing technologies, this paper presents opportunity to improve power density of induction machines by taking advantage of higher slot fill factor (SFF) (defined as ratio of bare copper area to slot area) is explored. Increase in SFF is achieved by deposition of copper in much more compact way than conventional manufacturing methods of winding in electrical machines. Thus a design tradeoff study for an induction motor with improved SFF is essential to identify and highlight the potentials of IM for high power density applications and is elaborated in this paper.

Induction machines (IM) are considered work horse for industrial applications due to their rugged, reliable and inexpensive nature; however, their low power density restricts their use in volume and weight limited environments such as an aerospace, traction and propulsion applications. Given recent advancements in additive manufacturing technologies, this paper presents opportunity to improve power density of induction machines by taking advantage of higher slot fill factor (SFF) (defined as ratio of bare copper area to slot area) is explored. Increase in SFF is achieved by deposition of copper in much more compact way than conventional manufacturing methods of winding in electrical machines. Thus a design tradeoff study for an induction motor with improved SFF is essential to identify and highlight the potentials of IM for high power density applications and is elaborated in this paper.

It is desired to reduce stator end winding length and mass to reduce associated resistive losses, increase efficiency and power density of an induction motor. With recent advancements in additive manufacturing technology, it is possible to deposit copper conductive paths and insulation layers in a selective controlled manner. This enables more compact end winding designs. The objective of this paper is to present a topology optimization based approach for design of stator end winding to minimize its overall length, volume and mass. Design approach and parametric study results for a representative stator design are presented in this paper. By reducing length of end winding, efficiency and power density of the induction motor can be increased enabling benefit realization for weight critical aerospace applications, incorporation in electric vehicle market and potentially reducing rare-earth dependency.