Electrical Machines Fundamentals of Electromechanical Energy Conversion by Jacek F. Gieras

The book is intended to serve as a textbook for basic courses on electrical machines covering the fundamentals of the electromechanical energy conversion, transformers, classical electrical machines, i.e., DC brush machines, induction machines (IM), wound-field rotor synchronous machines and modern electrical machines, i.e., switched-reluctance machines (SRM) and permanent magnet (PM) brushless machines. The author breaks the stereotype that a basic electrical machine course is limited only to transformers, DC brush machines, AC induction machines and wound-field synchronous machines.

In addition to academic research and teaching, the author has been working for over 18 years in the United States high-technology corporative business, being directly involved in solution to real problems as design, simulation, manufacturing and laboratory testing of a large variety of electrical machines for energy generation, conversion and utilization. Supervising young engineers the author is fully aware what the 21st century industry requires from them and how they should be trained to meet the demands of employers. The author wants to leverage his industrial experience to the classroom teaching.

The structure of this book is as follows. Chapter 1 gives a brief overview of electromechanical energy conversion which is needed to understand the next chapters and have a broad vision of operation of electromechanical energy devices in power trains. Chapter 2 discusses single phase and three-phase transformers used in power electrical engineering. Chapter 3 considers SRMs as the simplest electrical machines. It also shows that such machines must operate in a machine-solid state converter environment. Chapter 4 briefly discusses DC brush (commutator) machines.

 Nowadays, these machines are gradually replaced by vector-controlled induction and PM brushless motors, so the presented material is limited to fundamentals of standard DC brushless motors while emphasis is given to modern brush PM slotless motors. Chapter 5 deals with armature windings of AC electrical machines with focus on coils construction, connection diagrams, induced EMF, distribution of the magnetomotive force (MMF), and effect of magnetic saturation. 

The reader can familiarize with such terms as winding factors, saturation of magnetic circuit, effect of slotting and effect of higher space harmonics. This material is crucial to understand AC induction, synchronous and PM brushless machines. 

Chapter 6 on induction machines is the largest chapter in this book because induction motors are the most common machines in industrial, traction, energy systems and public life applications. This chapter also introduces fundamentals of inverter-fed induction motors. Chapter 7 is devoted to wound-field rotor synchronous machines with focus on turboalternators. This chapter ends with salient-pole rotor synchronous motors, which is a bridge to Chapter 8 on PM brushless motors. PM brushless motors are categorized into sine-wave (synchronous) motors and square wave brushless motors. In this chapter the reader can also find fundamentals of inverter-fed PM brushless motors.