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New Electric Motor Could Boost Efficiency of EVs, Scooters, and Wind Turbines

spectrum.ieee.org

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Re: New Electric Motor Could Boost Efficiency of EVs, Scooters, and Wind Turbines

#31

Post by bigiain »

coryrc wrote: post #15
crooked-v wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 10% is nothing to sneeze at but it also does not mean it is a game changer. They give a quote on a practical application: > The resulting Segway enjoyed a 50-percent increase in range, and four times the torque, which boosted the vehicle’s top speed and allowed it to climb a steep 20-percent grade. If that scales up linearly to electric cars, that's quite a boost.

That's a lie. Or, at least, there's another existing normal motor that can achieve at least nearly the same results. Existing motors are already 90+% efficient; it's not possible to make a 50% increase in range.

Possibly. You can get motors running 90+% efficiency, but only in a more or less narrow power band. If they can improve the efficiency in the ends of that bell curve, even if it's not an overall efficiency increase across the entire power/torque/rpm/"throttle" range, they might realistically be getting a 50% increase in "real world" use... Especially if they can do that in a way that removes the need for a gearbox (to keep the motor in it's highly efficient range).

Re: New Electric Motor Could Boost Efficiency of EVs, Scooters, and Wind Turbines

#32

Post by phkahler »

MobileVet wrote: post #16

These guys have definitely spent some money on PR since closing their investment round in April. They have placed 4+ articles with many of the same talking points, pictures and video over the last 2 weeks: https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/linear-labs-electric-turb... https://jalopnik.com/a-texas-startup-claims-to-have-made-the... https://newatlas.com/linear-labs-hunstable-electric-motor/60... https://insideevs.com/…

And they don't really have anything useful. Their claims dont make any sense to someone in the field. Now I have to file ieee spectrum under "willing to pedal bullshit for money" like so many other publications.

Re: New Electric Motor Could Boost Efficiency of EVs, Scooters, and Wind Turbines

#34

Post by MobileVet »

blacksmith_tb wrote: post #27
MobileVet wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would have agreed... but if that all helped them book IEEE, then it was worth it. From a reputation standpoint, IEEE could give them quite a bit of cache.

I'm all in favor of more cache, but I think that was supposed to read 'cachet'...

Ha... thanks.

Re: New Electric Motor Could Boost Efficiency of EVs, Scooters, and Wind Turbines

#35

Post by MobileVet »

phkahler wrote: post #32
MobileVet wrote: post #16

These guys have definitely spent some money on PR since closing their investment round in April. They have placed 4+ articles with many of the same talking points, pictures and video over the last 2 weeks: https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/linear-labs-electric-turb... https://jalopnik.com/a-texas-startup-claims-to-have-made-the... https://newatlas.com/linear-labs-hunstable-electric-motor/60... https://insideevs.com/…

And they don't really have anything useful. Their claims dont make any sense to someone in the field. Now I have to file ieee spectrum under "willing to pedal bullshit for money" like so many other publications.

Yea, not a good look for IEEE to be posting articles on buzz word vapor ware with pretty pictures.

Re: New Electric Motor Could Boost Efficiency of EVs, Scooters, and Wind Turbines

#36

Post by T3OU-736 »

MobileVet wrote: post #16

These guys have definitely spent some money on PR since closing their investment round in April. They have placed 4+ articles with many of the same talking points, pictures and video over the last 2 weeks: https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/linear-labs-electric-turb... https://jalopnik.com/a-texas-startup-claims-to-have-made-the... https://newatlas.com/linear-labs-hunstable-electric-motor/60... https://insideevs.com/…

My own tell-tale about those is the use of the word "could" in the description. Not an outright disqualifier, but raises the likelihood of the content being a PR fluff piece.

Re: New Electric Motor Could Boost Efficiency of EVs, Scooters, and Wind Turbines

#37

Post by fyfy18 »

hinkley wrote: post #28
jacquesm wrote: post #4

10% is nothing to sneeze at but it also does not mean it is a game changer. I like the way the coil ends are described, they are 'dead' weight in a normal motor because they don't contribute to the flux but they do contribute to the resistive losses in the motor. But that 10% of the length of the winding that sits outside of the coil chambers is not responsible for 10% of the electric consumption of the motor, which…

My take was the transmission, DC-DC converter, and 10% efficiency gain were essentially the same conversation. Transmissions and converters all result in transmission losses. They're also more components to purchase, install, and maintain. So if they can build a motor that embodies some of those qualities, that's an improvement, even if the resulting motor were slightly less efficient (which they say is not the case)…

The loses from AC/DC conversion must be pretty low. A typical solar installation with battery backup (e.g. Powerwall 2) would convert from DC to AC in the solar inverter, AC to DC when charging the Powerwall, DC to AC when discharging the Powerwall, then AC to DC when charging your electric car (and as you say, most likely DC to AC when driving it).

The original Powerwall was DC, so they must have run the numbers and found out the impact was minimal to switch to AC.

Re: New Electric Motor Could Boost Efficiency of EVs, Scooters, and Wind Turbines

#38

Post by jseutter »

balfirevic wrote: post #21
cagenut wrote: post #10

For those wondering what a seemingly marginal difference would mean in real world examples, take a look at this video from a conference on electric aircraft design a year ago: High Torque, Low RPM Motors – Key Enablers of Quiet Flight https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXd4M_pZl78

Transferse flux motors (from the talk) have a "too good to be true" ring to them. I wonder what will be of them in 5-10 years. Increasing the torque density compared to the current state-of-the-art would be a big deal for robotics applications.

In the latter part of the researcher mentions using different materials for the core of the motor to limit flux losses. Some of the efficient materials (cobalt in particular) are costly and would drive up the bill of materials cost of the motor compared to conventional motors, where copper is usually the biggest expense. One of his points was that a lot of the cost is currently around designing the motor to suit a given application, unlike existing electric motor designs where you can basically look in a book to see how it should be sized.

Aviation is probably the sweet spot application for this motor because decreased weight means increased payload and money. The increased cost is less of a concern than in, say, your cell phone. If you could run the motor without a gearbox and without active cooling, that would save costs in other areas and also decrease maintenance costs.

The "too good to be true" part of aviation is if it, together with battery technology, is able to keep airplanes in the air for a significant amount of time. The high energy density of aviation fuel means that we can build a "good enough" efficiency jet engine by building it like we do today, and just throw fuel at the problem to keep an airplane in the air. With electric propulsion the energy envelope is much tighter and we basically need these miracle solutions in battery tech, motor tech, or both, to make it viable. The presenter's premise was that an airplane that currently takes 180 horsepower to stay in the air, could do the same work with 90 horsepower if the motor and fan were designed differently. Many people are looking at the battery side of the equation, but not many people are looking at the motor side of the equation and there are significant gains to be had here. He then presents evidence indicating that designing a motor and fan differently is possible, and that current turbofan designs are optimized to work with the constraints of jet engines (ie, needing gearboxes to generate enough torque to run bigger and bigger fans).

Re: New Electric Motor Could Boost Efficiency of EVs, Scooters, and Wind Turbines

#40

Post by rickycook »

mywittyname wrote: post #17
coryrc wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a lie. Or, at least, there's another existing normal motor that can achieve at least nearly the same results. Existing motors are already 90+% efficient; it's not possible to make a 50% increase in range.

I agree that they are at least misrepresenting their achievement. However, for the sake of argument, electric motor efficiency goes down quite a lot as overall power potential and RPM both drop. So it's possible they've come up with a sizeable efficiency improvement in a worst-case scenario, i.e., improving efficiency of a small motor in low RPM, part throttle situations. If that's the case, however, it doesn't reall…

they did call out scooters and drones, so id guess you’re right
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