Some clarification:
Increasing ONLY the switching frequency decreases current ripple which actually decreases iron losses in the motor
Depends on material.
An ideal eddy current material has a Steinmetz core loss exponent of 2, and no dependence on frequency. The electrical equivalent circuit is a simple pole.
Real materials have an exponent larger or smaller than 2. If smaller, then losses rise slower with frequency than the impedance does. If larger, losses rise faster.
You'd have to look up typical loss curves for the silicon steel used in the motor, to find out which one is the case.
has nothing to do with EMI (basically triangle wave harmonics are in so high frequencies that changing just the base freq has little effect)
EMI is not due to the current waveform, at least not until you've done a damned good job attenuating all other offending sources in a circuit.
Switching noise from dV/dt and dI/dt, is different from the fundamental switching frequency.
Keep in mind that switching speed and fundamental are independent quantities. RFI tends to depend on the switching speed, the derivatives. EMI and RFI depend proportionally on the fundamental.
Note also that you cannot measure these generalizations in just any circuit, because any circuit will have quirks in its frequency response which modify the result. (Ideally, the result is strong attenuation at all frequencies, and thus little offending emission!)
increases the switching losses in the power stage.
Yes, most likely. (I could think of some possible exceptions, but they would not be generally applicable, nor likely to be used.)
The motor winding inductance itself acts as a filter and with H-bridge you can use 3-level voltage modulation (zero voltage vector / free wheeling) instead of 2-level on 3-phase motors so actually increasing the switching frequency don't have such a drastic difference as in 3-phase motors using 2-level voltage modulation.
Three-level drive is significantly better, because the harmonics are reduced proportionally. Good idea!
Copper losses/skin effect is dominated by the current ripple not voltage pwm freq and by increasing the sw freq you lower the ripple which decreases the copper losses also. But from the sleeve the effect of this is in the range of ~1% or even less compared to the total losses?
Skin effect is always proportional to frequency, or sqrt(F) rather.
If current ripple goes as 1/F, then copper losses will go as 1/sqrt(F).
The magnitude depends. Due to this factor, it will likely be more than 1%. R(ac) / R(dc) of a winding changes significantly with frequency. It depends on wire size and winding shape.
The loss is due to R(ac) * Iripple^2. (And, to be perfectly precise: this needs to be evaluated at all frequencies in the ripple current, following Parseval's theorem. In practice, R(ac) will not change as rapidly as the harmonics, which will go as 1/N to 1/N^2, so only the first few harmonics will be significant.)
DC copper loss, R(dc) * I(average)^2, does not vary with frequency, and remains dependent on load current (average, or RMS for LF AC).
Or, again more precisely: DC is just another term to add up, according to Parseval's theorem, and R(ac) at zero frequency is just R(dc). If we wish to account it separately, we can do so.
EMI is dominated by the dI/dt and dU/dt (rise/fall rate of the current & voltage) which don't change if you just increase the switching freq. Of course, with faster switching you typically want to also use faster switches/switching - optimization of losses and the overall circuit design once again. Up to the point you end up problems with the stray inductance/capacitance in your circuit (long wiring / poor PCB layout design).
Dominated, yes, but they
do change. The rate of those switching edges is proportional to switching frequency, therefore they become more frequent -- a higher duty cycle -- at higher frequency.
This shows up more on the average and QP spectrum, than the peak spectrum. The peak doesn't change (though a receiver might read a change in peak response anyway; depends), but the fundamental is well below the QP risetime so will tend to be averaged out, and sensitive to duty cycle.
Also the transmission line effects (cabling and the need for dU/dt filtering) is dominated by the dU/dt, not the switching frequency. The switching is square wave +/-Udc (& zero volts when using H-bridge) always with 2-/3-level voltage modulation. The fundamental wave is there but the EMI and transmission line effects are dominated by the harmonics (= square wave nature, the fast edge of the voltage waveform).
This fits under my earlier statement that the circuit has a filtering effect on the ideal waveform contents. As a result, changing the frequency in a particular case may make EMI better or worse, because different frequency components hit different peaks and valleys in the response. Ideally, the response should be flat and well attenuated, so this doesn't happen.
Tim