A Fast Calculation Approach for Pressure Finger Losses in Large Salient-Pole Synchronous Machines

This article proposes a new, computationally inexpensive calculation approach for eddy current losses in nonmagnetic pressure fingers for open-circuit operation. The field calculation was presented in a previous article (Fricke et al. , 2019) and is based on a Schwarz–Christoffel mapping. An alternative 2-D FEA field calculation is presented. The loss model discretizes the pressure fingers similar to 2-D FEA and solves an electric network, while allowing for geometric different alterations, such as slits, to be considered. The proposed approach takes only around one second to compute, with the loss model itself taking only around 60 ms. Comparisons to a time-step 3-D FEA model are used to validate the new method.