This whole thing sounds like a scam. Even worse, it's in an IEEE article. I'm really glad I ended my subscription to them so many years ago if they've fallen to these depths. Just look at this one line from their article:
>Torque is the amount of work that a motor or engine produces, typically measured on a per-revolution basis.
No, that's energy, not torque. Torque is rotational force. Torque times rotation is power, which is the rate of work. Work = energy. This is Engineering 101 here; it's inexcusable for the IEEE of all organizations to screw this up. I expect this kind of lousy journalism from a mainstream, layman news outlet like NBC or something, not something aimed at engineers.
>A typical motor’s copper content could be reduced by 30 percent, while generating equivalent torque, they say. So for a given torque level, the HET consumes significantly less energy than competing designs.
Very little of the electrical energy input to a motor is consumed by resistive losses in the windings; almost all of it is consumed by conversion to mechanical energy. Reducing winding resistance is nice, but it's not going to produce some enormous energy savings. Reducing the weight is helpful too, but again, those extra windings are only a fraction of the motor's weight, and unless the motor is being used in an aircraft, motor weight isn't really that big a deal in a vehicle, battery weight is.
>The company’s permanent-magnet tech requires no rare-earth metals.
This sounds like a total crock. Always be suspicious of new inventions when a single invention claims revolutionary advances in more than one field. Magnet technology is separate from motor technology, just like CPU technology is separate from mobile phone technology: it's a very necessary component, but still a component, one which is usually sourced from an outside vendor. Motor manufacturers do not make their own permanent magnets; there's companies that specialize in that. And making magnets with the highest densities of magnetic flux without rare-earth elements would be a pretty big game-changer, so why are they talking about motor windings instead of this?
>The system incorporates a purely electronic transmission
A what? Not possible: a transmission is a mechanical item that converts rotary motion into rotary motion at a different speed and torque level (e.g., high-speed, low-torque into low-speed, high-torque). This is just a meaningless sound bite. Most EVs use transmissions (usually single-speed "gearboxes", not multi-speed "transmissions") because they'd have to make the motor physically larger to generate the torque necessary to drive a car directly, and the extra weight and size isn't worth it; it's easier to drive motors fast and use a gearbox to gear it down, even with the efficiency loss.
>Many electrified vehicles must also integrate a DC-to-DC converter
Again, the "Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers" apparently don't understand basic electronics any more. Most EVs use 3-phase brushless motors, or induction motors (Tesla). The motor controllers are driven by DC because that's what Li-ion batteries produce, and they output waveforms to directly drive the windings on the motor in accordance with the current demand for power. I don't see how they expect to get around some sort of controller here.
Sorry, this whole piece sounds like BS. The whole thing is likely some kind of scam to get investor money and then disappear.