A Novel Thermal Analysis Method for Tubular PM Linear Motors Based on Transfer Learning

Thermal modeling and analysis are critical for permanent magnet linear synchronous motors (PMLSMs), particularly in multi-physical analysis and motor design optimization. This paper proposes a new method for thermal steady state modeling and analysis based on transfer learning, which combines the thermal mechanism model with the data-driven model to achieve high-precision temperature analysis with small number of finite element analysis (FEA) samples. First, an equivalent thermal circuit (ETC) model is established for PMLSMs based on the structural parameters and heat transfer principles. Second, a hybrid model based on transfer learning is developed: the model is pre-trained by a large sample set generated from the ETC in the source field (mechanism analytical model), and then the trained model is transferred to the target field (FEA data-driven model). The parameters of the neural network in the target field are optimized by a few FEA sample sets with higher precision to improve the prediction accuracy of the target model. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly boosts the performance of the deep neural network (DNN) model, particularly when training sets are small. The root mean square error (RMSE) of the DNN model decreases by 0.901 in the 5:5 (training/testing) dataset and 1.726 in the 2:8 dataset; and the corresponding R ² and maximal absolute error of motor performances are significantly decreased. The smaller the proportion of the training set, the better performance of the hybrid modeling will achieve. Furthermore, a temperature rise experiment conducted on a prototype motor validates the efficacy and precision of the proposed hybrid modeling methodology.