Recently, the demand for electric motors that can achieve high performance while ensuring stable magnet supply has continued to increase across various industrial sectors. Although rare-earth permanent magnets, such as neodymium and samarium cobalt, enable superior electromagnetic performance, their high cost and supply instability have motivated growing interest in motors employing non-rare-earth permanent magnets, such as ferrite magnets. Due to the relatively low remanent flux density and coercivity of non-rare-earth magnets, spoke-type rotor structures are commonly adopted to enhance flux concentration. However, spoke-type configurations inherently suffer from axial leakage flux, in which a portion of the magnetic flux generated by the permanent magnets fails to link with the stator and instead leaks along the axial direction. This axial leakage flux reduces the effective air-gap flux density, leading to a degradation of back electromotive force (back-EMF) and overall motor performance. In this study, a double-spoke-type motor employing asymmetric permanent magnet geometry is investigated. Finite element analysis (FEA) is performed to identify an effective rotor structure that reduces axial leakage flux without increasing magnet usage, demonstrating the feasibility of performance improvement in non-rare-earth permanent magnet motors.

The growing demand for compact and high-performance motors in industrial robotic joints has intensified interest in axial flux permanent magnet motors (AFPMs), which inherently offer high torque density and a thin form factor compared with conventional radial flux permanent magnet motors (RFPMs). Among various AFPM structures, printed circuit board (PCB) Stator motors have gained significant attention due to their slotless configuration, reduced cogging torque, low vibration and acoustic noise, and enhanced geometric thinness enabled by PCB-etched conductors. This study proposes a conductor arrangement strategy that mitigates back-EMF imbalance in concentrated-winding single-rotor PCB AFPM for robotic joints. Several conductor configurations are analyzed and compared through electromagnetic finite-element evaluation, and an optimized arrangement is identified that effectively improves phase EMF symmetry while maintaining structural thinness. The results provide design guidelines for high-performance PCB AFPMs suitable for next-generation robotic actuators.