Peiyang Zeng

About

I make things spin. Before that, I made things float.

These days I spend most of my time persuading copper, steel and magnets to cooperate, and teaching electric motors to keep calm and carry on when part of them breaks. In an electric car, a faulty motor ruins your afternoon. In an electric plane, it ruins considerably more, so we would really rather it kept spinning. Before that, I spent several years helping trains levitate, which is exactly as fun as it sounds and involves more liquid nitrogen than you would expect.

The longer version. I am a doctoral researcher in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Sheffield, working on fault-tolerant permanent magnet machines for transportation electrification. My work focuses on fault-tolerant design at the machine level, so that the machine itself can keep running safely through faults such as single-phase short circuits and inter-turn short circuits, in applications where stopping is not an option, from electric vehicles to more-electric aircraft.

Before Sheffield, I studied at Southwest Jiaotong University (2017–2024), where my undergraduate degree was in railway vehicle systems. My master's research focused on high-temperature superconducting (HTS) pinning maglev, in particular measuring permanent magnet guideway (PMG) irregularity and its effect on levitation dynamics. Later, I moved on to the electromagnetic analysis and conjugate heat transfer (CFD) simulation of a double-sided long-stator permanent magnet linear synchronous motor for an ultra-high-speed maglev test model aiming for 1,500 km/h, and that is where my interest shifted towards transportation electrification. My broader interests include applied electromagnetics, electromechanical energy conversion and dynamic analysis.

Featured work

Fault-tolerant permanent magnet machines with mixed-layer fractional-slot concentrated windings

P. Zeng and G.-J. Li, IEEE Transactions on Energy Conversion, 2026, doi: 10.1109/TEC.2026.3741602

Aircraft are increasingly replacing hydraulic systems with electric motors, including in safety-critical roles such as flight-control actuators. A motor in these roles must keep running when one of its phases fails. That means each phase should be magnetically isolated from the others, and any short-circuit current should stay low. Fractional-slot concentrated windings are a natural fit for this, and they come in two standard forms. Winding every other tooth (single-layer) isolates the phases well, but brings longer end-windings and more torque ripple. Winding every tooth (double-layer) runs more smoothly, but couples the phases magnetically. For compact machines with an odd number of slots, such as the 9-slot/8-pole design studied here, the single-layer option is not available at all.

In this paper we propose a mixed-layer winding that brings this isolation to the 9-slot/8-pole permanent magnet machine. We combine single- and double-layer coil arrangements and redesign the stator tooth layout to suit them. The resulting machine achieves a unity winding factor and near-zero mutual inductance between phases. It also has higher self-inductance, which suppresses fault currents. At the same time, it delivers the same average torque as its conventional double-layer counterpart, with comparable copper loss. We build up the design step by step and explain why it works using analytical magnetic-circuit models. We then validate it with finite-element analysis and experimental tests on a prototype.

(a) 9-slot/8-pole double-layer fractional-slot concentrated-winding (FSCW) surface-mounted permanent magnet (SPM) machine

(b) One coil per phase removed, giving the mixed-layer machine

(c) Optimal winding factor 9-slot/8-pole mixed-layer FSCW SPM machine with near-zero phase mutual inductance

(d) Wound stator of the mixed-layer prototype, built for the experimental tests

From a conventional double-layer winding to the proposed mixed-layer machine, and the stator of the prototype built to test it.

Publications

2026

Fault-tolerant permanent magnet machines with mixed-layer fractional-slot concentrated-windings

P. Zeng, G.-J. Li. IEEE Transactions on Energy Conversion
2025

Vibration separation method for permanent magnet guideway irregularity measurement

Y. Luo, Y. Yuan, P. Zeng, et al. Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing
2025

Measurement and signal compensation method of permanent magnet guideway irregularity in high-temperature superconducting pinning maglev system

Y. Luo, Y. He, P. Zeng, et al. IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement
2023

Effect of Al alloy permanent magnetic guideway enclosure on the dynamic performance of HTS pinning maglev system

P. Zeng, J. Zhang, Z. Deng, et al. IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity
2023

Permanent magnet guideway irregularity measurement and characterization by single Dewar HTS pinning maglev system

Y. Luo, Y. Yuan, P. Zeng, et al. IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement

Full list on ResearchGate

Photography

I used to do photography. Then life happened.

I came back to photography on film, as a small protest against the digitalisation of everyday life. It is entirely possible that this is simply a consumerist fantasy, lovingly packaged by late capitalism and sold back to me one roll at a time. I am choosing not to think about it too hard.