I-Corps: High - Reliability and Low - Cost Design of Electric Motor for Automotive Industry Application

由于最近对清洁能源的需要和矿物燃料供应的减少，在以替代能源为基础的发电的研究和应用方面取得了显著进展。电动机和发电机是绿色技术的重要组成部分，产生或消耗的大部分电能来自替代能源，特别是在公共交通领域，包括汽车工业和航空航天工业。基于稀土材料的三相电机已广泛应用于安全优先的公共交通系统（用于电源管理、储能等），成本和可靠性也成为关键的市场问题。因此，I-Corps团队的重点是设计高可靠性、低成本、容错且不含稀土材料的电机，以满足汽车行业目标市场细分的需求。目标产品将是一种无稀土材料的多相同步磁阻电机（FMSM）。与传统的低功率电机不同，它被设计为单或三相电机，所提出的多相电机采用五相架构设计，这是一种最佳解决方案，可以在市场上所有理论和实际可用的低功率电机中提供最低成本和最高可靠性。该架构还提供了紧凑的尺寸和延长的使用寿命，减少了电磁干扰（EMI）。为了进一步降低制造成本，稀土材料将被铁氧体材料取代。铁氧体材料在自然界中储量丰富，比稀土材料便宜10倍左右。此外，输出功率将基于一种创新的替代性扭矩产生机制产生，这将进一步降低材料利用成本，同时大大简化设计。

The recent need for clean energy and the decreasing availability of fossil fuels have resulted in a noticeable progress in research and application of power generation based on alternative energy sources. Electric Motors and Generators are important components in the green technology, generating or consuming majority of the electric energy from alternative energy sources, especially in public transportation area including automotive industry and aerospace industry. As the rare-earth-material-based three-phase electric machine has been popularly applied to the public transportation systems (for power management, energy storage, etc.) where safety is a priority, cost and reliability have also become critical market issues. This I-Corps team's focus is, therefore, on the design of high-reliability, low-cost electric machines that are fault-tolerant and free of rare-earth materials to meet the needs of target market segmentation in automotive industry.The target product will be a Rare-earth material Free Multiphase Synchronous reluctance Motor (FMSM). Unlike the conventional low-power machine, which is designed as a single- or three-phase machine, the proposed multiphase motor is designed using a 5-phase architecture, an optimal solution to provide the lowest cost and highest reliability among all theoretically and practically available low-power machines in the market. The proposed architecture also provides compact size and extended lifetime with reduced electro-magnetic interferences (EMI). To further reduce manufacturing costs, Rare-earth materials will be substituted by Ferrite materials. Ferrite materials are abundant in nature and about 10 times cheaper than Rare-earth materials. In addition, the output power will be generated based on an innovative and alternative torque generation mechanism which will lead to further reduced costs in material utilization while significantly simplifying the design.