Recently, the news of the shortage of automotive chips has been on the screen again, and the shortage of chips in auto factories around the world has not been settled, and it has risen again and again. Major manufacturers are suffering, but they have brought good news in terms of battery life technology. On the 20th of this month, researchers at the University of New South Wales in Sydney recently developed a new electric motor that can rotate every minute. 100,000 laps. The high power density achieved by this new design could help reduce the weight of electric vehicles (EVs), thereby increasing their range, the university said in a press release.
The battery life problem of new energy electric vehicles has always been an anxiety for manufacturers. One of the solutions is to increase the size of the battery pack, but this will also increase the weight of the vehicle and bring more problems to be solved.
Another solution is to reduce the weight of the electric motor, which is achieved by increasing its speed. A motor that spins at high speeds can be downsized, which not only reduces its weight, but also reduces its energy consumption, which, when applied to an electric vehicle, can help increase its range.
Motor weight can be very important to the overall cost and operating value of the system. Motor weight reduction can be addressed in several directions, including universal motor design, efficient component production, and material selection. The efficiency of a motor depends on the type, size, utilization of the motor, and also on the quality and quantity of materials used. Therefore, from all these aspects, electric motors need to be developed using energy and cost-effective components. Researchers at UNSW Sydney have used a new rotor topology that not only increases the robustness of the motor, but also reduces the rare earth material needed to produce the motor by as much as 70%.
UNSW researchers also used an artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted optimization procedure that assessed a wide range of electrical, magnetic, mechanical and thermal aspects to optimise the design of the electric motor. Developed in-house, the program evaluates 90 designs, then selects the top 50% of them to generate new designs, iteratively, until the desired optimum is reached. The final motor the researchers used was the 120th generation analyzed by the program.
Hopefully this motor can be commercialized quickly and to market sooner than we expected. "If an EV manufacturer like Tesla wants to use this motor, I believe it will only take about 6 to 12 months to modify it to their specifications," the researchers said.
According to PERCEPTIVE's understanding, the researchers said that if this motor is used in an electric vehicle motor, it will reduce its speed to a certain extent, in order to increase its power, for example, a 200kW motor, with a maximum speed of about 18,000rpm, is completely suitable for electric vehicles. automotive applications.
In addition to electric vehicles, the motor can be used in large heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems using high-speed compressors, as well as in high-precision CNC machine tools. The electric motor can also be deployed inside an aircraft engine as an integrated drive generator (IDG) to power the electrical system.
