I know this subject is off topic, but if anyone has any experience designing rotating electric machinery and could recommend a software product for this purpose I would be grateful.

My motor colleagues use the following software for motor design/modelling:

MotorCAD
SPEED
JMAG
Opera

Not being a motor designer myself I am not entirely sure which is the best but I think that SPEED is used for intial motor designs and then JMAG/Opera is used for 2D/3D FEA.

Also worth looking at Infolytica software too as some people reccomend this.

Hope this helps as a starting point! You may be better off asking in the one the electric machine design groups as there are far more people with a lot more knowledge than me in some of those groups!....

Thanks Luke

A few years ago I had to design a specialised small generator and I found a package called Flux3d was very useful. It accurately predicted flux densities in critical areas, and the modelling of output voltages and waveforms were quite accurate. From what I remember, it was quite expensive, but you could rent it by the month and they had a free demo version.

Thanks Clive

I am not a motor designer by far, but I use Comsol for designing transformers and inductors and have seen model examples of motors and generators applications in both 2D and 3D. It also enables a multi-physics approach to design because of its ability to couple other physics like flow and heat transfer as well.

Jim - you don't mention what motor types but SPEED is certainly a very good general purpose package for designing a variety of different motors. It has different parts for most motor types. It is a while since I have used it and I believe it has been improved in more recent years to include FEA etc. It was originally intended for rapid evaluation without requiring the brute force of FEA and is certainly very successful at that. As with all packages though, you have to know it's little foibles and know when it isn't going to do a good job. At that point FEA is the usual route. MotorCAD is a complement package which redresses thermals. Just a warning, designing motors is not for the feint-hearted being quite complex. In some ways much of what you may know from inductors and transformers is of course relevant but there is much more to it than that. I subcontract any motor design to EMX in the UK (www.elektro.co.uk) as I concluded years ago that I wasn't doing enough to keep my hand in.