A Simulation-Based Approach to Optimize Variant Flexible Hairpin Stator Production

The hairpin stator technology has gained wide acceptance for electric motors in traction applications. However, low production volumes and high tooling costs are challenging for manufacturers. Particularly when it comes to a variation of stator designs for different applications, a loss in production time due to setup processes is noticeable. Industry 4.0 technologies such as virtualization and simulation allow the creation of accurate digital replicas of physical phenomena. Such digital models could also be applied for production plants to optimize and develop manufacturing processes by simulating various boundary conditions. Within this paper, a simulation-based approach of a production plant model is established to analyze and optimize a prototypical variant flexible process chain of hairpin stators. A Plant simulation software is used to set up and simulate the prototypical hairpin stator production plant model for two different stator dimensions. Various experiments are run inside the simulation model to monitor the plant behavior for variant flexible production under different operation settings, such as failures, buffers and demands. The simulation results are analyzed and compared with representative plant data, offering insights for potential optimization solutions.