In this paper, a general approach to the description of the magnetic field and temperature distribution in electrical machines using the spectral element analysis is presented. In the spectral element method, higher order Legendre-Gauss-Lobatto polynomials are applied to describe the different fields. The magnetic flux distribution is derived using the magnetic vector potential and nonlinear magnetic material is modeled based on its BH-curve. The thermal model is based on the heat equation. The

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... magnetic and thermal domains are coupled by the ohmic and iron losses, the latter is computed using the loss separation model of Bertotti. The results are compared with FEM and a good agreement is obtained for both the spatial magnetic flux density and the temperature distributions.