A 17-year-old designed a novel synchronous reluctance motor

> No creative impulse, just worries about chores/bills/obligation

I think that's critical in many people's lives and I've felt it starting to creep in my, but I think I'm keeping it at bay. Based on personal experience, when you settle down and/or start family, chores/bills/obligations start creeping up on you massively. It's very easy to get sucked into a mindset that if you start falling behind on those, your life will start falling apart. In reality, a lot of those can be postponed with only minor downsides. Yes, you can live in a slightly dirtier/less organized house. Yes, the lawn can be slightly less maintained. Yes, you can probably postpone that car service another week. Just sit down, forget about the world [not] falling apart and enjoy your hobbies. Write some side-project code, start a hardware tinkering project that you're unlikely to finish. Disassemble a failing kitchen appliance to see if you can fix it. Those things bring way more to your life than the apparent utility!

This is inspiring, and let's look at why so many of us have the impulse to figure out what the flaw or missing part of the story is.

For me, it's because I hadn't done something so cool at 17. That makes me think, huh, I wonder if I'm not a "natural born engineer". I start going through my life story so far and beating myself up for playing too many video games, or not going deep enough on my interests.

Then I start thinking about the ways my life is different from his. I start to feel resentment about the opportunities I didn't have, the resources that weren't available. What could I have done if things had been different?

Next I start to resent how society scores us on things that can contribute to the economy, or things that look particularly cool, and things that we accomplished at a young age.

And then I start to imagine the difficulties that this young inventor will have. "Oh yes", I think, "He'll find out soon enough what the REAL world is like."

And these thoughts are not who I want to be. But I can reflect and learn something about myself from them. And I can choose to go another way.

I can decide that, if a 17 year old kid with the right resources and a crazy idea can make something really cool, then I, as an adult with more experience and resources can make something at least as cool if I want to. And I'm going to. It's not like my life is over because I'm older than 17.

And if this article is making you spiral with insecurity, I hope you make a similar decision. A decision to be inspired instead of intimidated.

That's a false dichotomy

> If this kid can't handle a little bit of criticism

I do expect adults - over 25 - to take the rough with the smooth. But children are not adults.

I think you're assuming your own competence at pedagogy. I would want to shield children from you until they've developed the resilience you demand from them.

Also, the emotional tone - sheesh

That's a very good question. I have an EV motor control and calibration background so lots to say here. First off, peak efficiency tends to occur at mid to high speed and mid to high torque, in other words high power. Most EVs spend very little time operating anywhere near their peak power. It may take as little as 4kW to drive down the highway at constant speed, but a motor may be capable of 100kW or much more.

Efficiency at 500 to 1000 RPM is important, and reluctance machines tend to be very poor at those speeds and low torques. So maybe he increased efficiency from 30 percent to 61 percent, which would be really good. Or maybe he increased efficiency from 50 percent to 65.5 percent (65.5/50 = 1.31 but I hate looking at percent change of a percentage). What he did not do is increase the max efficiency significantly at an already efficient operating point where most motors are already over 90 percent, and that's OK because like I said we don't operate up there very often.

BTW, IMHO the best way to characterize electric machines like this is not to look at their efficiency, but to look at their losses. There's a really nice way to plot losses but it's a bit hard to explain in a comment. He also doesn't seem to have a dyno which makes taking data and testing a lot easier.

Anyway, he did a great job and will undoubtedly continue doing so!

Can be done for just the filing fee. But you'd likely want to have council help, about $6k last I looked.