In contrast, all automotive PM motors are "interior PM" machines. This means the magnets are buried inside a steel rotor. While this seems counter-intuitive at first (doing this moves the magnets further from the stator and makes the rotor heavier), putting the magnets inside a chunk of steel gives the motor several features which are highly beneficial for traction applications.
Greatly increased inductance: The surface PM motor has low inductance. This is because the PM's have a much lower permeability than steel, effectively putting a huge air gap in the flux path. In contrast, the interior PM machine places the rotor steel very close to the stator teeth; the magnetic air gap is only the size of the physical air gap, and this greatly increases the inductance, often by a factor of 10 over a similarly-sized surface PM machine.
Having high inductance is important, because for traction applications, the switching frequency is primarily determined by the allowable current ripple (excessive current ripple increases the resistive losses in the copper and conduction and switching losses in the inverter). Being able to reduce the switching frequency can drastically reduce inverter losses. Conversely, for some types of very low inductance and resistance motors (Emrax, Yasa), system efficiency is much lower than what the motor specifications alone would indicate, as Si IGBT inverters have a hard time efficiently driving these types of motor.
Position varying inductance: Why does this matter? Recall that inductance stores energy, and torque is the angle derivative of the co-energy of a system (or, roughly speaking, the system will try to settle to its lowest energy state). This means that by properly manipulating the stator currents, we can use this varying inductance to generate torque: the so-called reluctance torque. Reluctance torque is beneficial because it behaves very differently from the torque generated by the attraction of the magnets to the stator (the PM torque); it grows with both d and q-axis current, and doesn't necessarily generate additional back EMF.
We typically assume that the inductances vary sinusoidally; the typical model therefore has two inductances, \(L_d < L_q\), the "d-axis" and "q-axis" inductances.
Field weakening: Field weakening uses the stator inductance to generate a voltage that counters the back EMF produced by the permanent magnets. This is typically done by injecting current on the d-axis (on a surface PM motor, \(I_d\) is normally close to zero). Field weakening is typically presented as an atypical operating regime, a way to get a little extra speed out of your motor after you've run out of volts. This is because surface PM motors have very low inductance and relatively high flux linkage, necessitating a large amount of d-axis current to cancel out the PM flux. Furthermore, \(I_d\) only serves to generate heat on surface PM motors, and produces no additional torque.
In contrast, IPM's have a much higher ratio of inductance to flux linkage, which means the d-axis current needed to cancel the PM flux is much lower. Furthermore, because of reluctance torque, the d-axis current generates some torque, so it is not entirely wasted. In fact, well-designed IPM's have virtually no top speed; the top speed is not limited by available voltage, but rather by rotor mechanical integrity and hysteresis losses.
Higher speed operation: The rotor iron has an obvious benefit: it mechanically constrains the PM's and prevents them from flying off at high speeds. Running the motor faster makes the motor better. Being able to run a motor twice as fast means it can make twice the power, so despite their slightly lower torque density, IPM's can have higher power density than their surface PM counterparts.
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