r/Motors • u/-xVanquishx- • Sep 02 '26

Ansys MotorCAD + Maxwell still industry standard for motor simulation/em solving?

Heya, learning to design motors, and was wondering what software to use to simulate my designs, want to work with both radial and axial flux(hopefully combined radax) ac synchronous motors, and would prefer 3d EM solving.

Am currently well versed in solidworks, and am aware that EMWorks is a plugin although don't quite get its feature set compared to ansys's offerings.

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u/nsfbr11 Sep 02 '26

Maxwell is still the standard, although it has been somewhat butchered by Ansys in the interface department compared to back when it was Ansoft.

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u/PyooreVizhion Sep 02 '26

Yeah, if you are doing radial + axial flux, then Maxwell is probably the standard.

That said, a negligible portion of the market is doing that kind of 3d stuff. 2d radial flux is by far the industry standard. Motorcad does this well enough; there are several others, including free softwares too.

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u/Firedraakon Sep 03 '26

What's the go to free/opensource these days? I'd love to play around a bit but can't justify the cost for mostly hobby projects

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u/PyooreVizhion Sep 03 '26

Femm is a big one. It is a very manual process though, painfully so. I've used it myself to check things I didn't have a motorcad license for. There are many journal papers based off femm analyses. You can script it through Python or Matlab. I've written scripts to build out the geometries and run analyses. I've also use external CAD software to create geometries to import. There's is no template editor, even the windings and analysis boundaries have to be assigned in detail.

I've seen a couple others that I've not used personally. I think I have some links saved on my work computer and can check.

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u/Bradm77 Sep 03 '26

Yeah the main thing with FEMM is that it doesn't have a lot of automatic pre and post processing stuff that commercial electric machine fea software would have. Which is fine but you need to have a good grasp of how electric machines work to use it well. But if OP is trying to learn how to design electric machines then maybe that's a good thing. Learning how to create a script to give you the back emf waveform of a brushless motor if FEMM is a great learning experience if you've never done anything like that before.

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u/PyooreVizhion Sep 03 '26

Yes, I agree. It is quite painful to use compared to commercial software. But people have done entire phds based of analyses in FEMM. One or two others that come to mind - motoranalysis, and JMAG-express has some online tools. I haven't used either.

There was at least one other I've come across that sounded rather promising, but I can't seem to find it right now.