**Dong Yu, Xiaoyan Huang \*, Lijian Wu and Youtong Fang**

College of Electrical Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China; 11410025@zju.edu.cn (D.Y.); lijianwu@zju.edu.cn (L.W.); youtong@zju.edu.cn (Y.F.)

**\*** Correspondence: xiaoyanhuang@zju.edu.cn; Tel.: +86-8795-3134

Received: 26 February 2019; Accepted: 28 March 2019; Published: 1 April 2019

**Abstract:** This paper presents a novel outer rotor permanent-magnet vernier machine (PMVM) for in-wheel direct-drive application. The overhang structures of the rotor and flux modulation pole (FMP) are introduced. The soft magnetic composite (SMC) was adopted in the FMP overhang to allow more axial flux. The 3-D finite element analysis (FEA) was carried out to prove that the proposed machine can effectively utilize the end winding space to enhance the air-gap flux density. Hence the PMVM can offer 27.3% and 14.5% higher torque density than the conventional machine with no overhang structure and the machine with only rotor overhang structure, respectively. Nevertheless, the efficiency of the proposed machine is slightly lower than the conventional ones due to the extra losses from the overhang structures.

**Keywords:** permanent-magnet vernier machine; in-wheel direct-drive; outer rotor; overhang; soft magnetic composite
