Newly developed motor cooling method using refrigerant

Abstract

One of the greatest issues for electric vehicles such as an electric vehicle (EV), a hybrid vehicle (HV), a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) and a fuel cell vehicle (FCV) is further improvement of effective motor cooling, since higher rated torque is achieved with higher cooling performance. In this paper, we introduce and propose a newly developed motor cooling method we tested using refrigerant, comparing with conventional water cooling. Test results show higher cooling performance of refrigerant cooling, which achieved the rated torque 60% higher than that of water cooling.