Samarium is an innovative tool to help in the electromagnetic design of three-phase brushless radial-field, surface-mounted and interior buried spoke oriented permanent-magnet DC motors.

Slotted and slotless motors, inner rotor and outer rotor motors, as well as motors with different magnet geometries can be easily designed using Samarium. It combines a powerful design and modeling engine based on analytical equations with industrial strength multi-order FEA (finite-element analysis). The post-processor allows easy visualization of the results and high flexibility.

Samarium can be used for rapid response to new custom design requests. Most preliminary designs can be done within 30 minutes or less and refining the preliminary design may be even faster. For new designs, validation of the analytical design is made possible with the integrated finite-element engine.

Highly accurate predictions of motor performance are possible with the analytical engine. For existing designs, Samarium effortlessly and accurately predicts the resulting performance parameters with changes in motor length, winding, magnet material, lamination steel material, etc., in just a few seconds. With built in database support for magnet, lamination & rotor steel, and magnet wire materials, designing a new motor is easy, straightforward and accurate.

Samarium includes several features that are useful in the manufacturing process of the motor such as allowing export of the motor design in DXF format, providing zero back EMF positions (for hall sensor locations), allowing predicted performance changes with forced sensor errors, etc..

See the full sequence.

The image on the right shows one step from a 2nd order multirun of 180 mechanical degrees in 4-degree steps. The full sequence is available as an animated GIF file (compiled with third-party software).

This example uses the "Red hot" color map with only 8 sub-colors to bring out the variations in the magnetic flux density after a rotor position multirun. A number of color maps are available in Samarium. The number of sub-colors can also be changed to visualize the fields in several different ways.

The "Partial motor model" option was enabled. The fields outside the stator OD and in the winding area were hidden to emphasize the fields in the stator, rotor, and air gap. When symmetry is present in the motor, the mesh generator and FEA engine optionally allow only a part of the motor to be simulated. The partial motor model results in either a saving of time or a gain in accuracy.

Some of the features in Samarium are listed below. More information can be obtained from the Online help files.

• Parametric motor modeling, no CAD software required
• Three dimensional models of all motor components are automatically generated
• Flexible analytical design engine which allows for several practical parameters to be adjusted
• Industrial strength mesh generator which allows user intervention, superb mesh refinement capability
• Robust FEA engine with refinement capability and Gradient Recovery based error estimation
• Automatic h-adaptive mesh refinement controlled by FEA, upto third order triangular elements
• Automatic air gap force error calculation and refinement for accurate cogging torque calculations
• Several user controllable parameters for highly saturated non-linear FEA as in designing magnetizing fixtures
• Parallel processing capability (when applicable) using multiple processors/cores for time saving

New versions of the software, post April 2010 support advanced texture rendering and background images to produce photo-realistic images of the motor. These can be used for presentations, etc. or for a realistic image of the motor and sub components before producing any parts.

Samarium is licensed on a yearly basis, and updates are made available to all licensed users. For specific details about licensing options, please contact us. Fully functional versions of Samarium can be provided for evaluation purposes with a time limited license.

Samarium design software is the result of more than 10 years of permanent-magnet brushless DC motor design experience, as well as hands-on experience of assembly and testing. Hundreds of paper designs have been made using Samarium, and it has been fine-tuned with the prototyping of many of those designs. Several established production lines are already manufacturing motors designed with Samarium.

Samarium is offered in different modular configurations:

• Samarium with integrated finite element analysis and Cobalt (see below)
• Samarium with integrated finite element analysis

The (optional) Cobalt module provides help in the design of permanent magnet magnetizing fixtures, using analytical and finite-element analysis for multipole ring and arc magnets. The animation on the right shows the flux density variations in a four-pole magnetizing fixture during magnetization.

Availability of Cobalt as a stand-alone application is planned.

Also available are special optional modules for Samarium:

• Analytical optimization assistant

See the full sequence (~3 Mb)).

The Analytical optimization engine allows several parameters to be varied between a user defined minimum, maximum, and number of steps. Several different constraints can be imposed and after simulation of all steps, only results that have passed the constraint criteria are presented to the user. This rapidly reduces optimization time and allows the user to refine an already refined solution. Shown in the sequence is an example where the rotor diameter, tooth width, stack length, magnet arc angle, and number of stator slots are varied. The animation has been time crunched and does not represent the actual time for optimization. Several other parameters can be varied as well such that solutions close to true global optimizations are possible. This engine will be ready to ship by early 2011.

The help file for the latest version of Samarium is available through the menu on the left. It provides details of using the software for design as well as a brief overview of the software itself. For more details, please contact us.