Breakthrough in Electric Motor Efficiency?
I had a wonderful seafood breakfast this morning at Moby Dick’s in Santa Barbara, with two folks whose start-up is built around an apparent breakthrough in electric motors. I’ve been on the lookout for just an improvement, as, in truth, few serious innovations have taken place since Edison and Tesla “did their thing” in this space about 120 years ago.
But is this the one? I’m always skeptical, as there are so many criteria at stake. Obviously, a breakthrough should mean a dramatic reduction in cost. But it shouldn’t take up more space, use rare materials, weigh more, constitute a safety hazard, or require a ton of exotic electronic controllers. And certainly, more efficiency would be nice; that’s the real kicker. The real cost of the motor lies in running it over the course of its life, rather than in the device itself. Of course, the motors we have in our electric vehicles are already over 90% efficiency, but a great number of those we use in our day-to-day lives, e.g., motors for pool filters, are under 50%; that leaves lots of ground to be made up.
I just checked this out to verify. Here’s the spec sheet for a popular pump motor, the Pentair. Let’s pick the WFE-4 at random, and note that it draws 14.8 amps at 115 V = 1702 Watts, but only puts out 1 HP, (746 Watts) = 44%. Lots of room for improvement, to say the least.
I’ll keep you posted.
Craig, this is a great thread to pull on and see where it leads. I’m not familiar with all the newest technologies, but for a number of years now a number of universities and private companies have been working to achieve over 96% efficiency in everyday motors. I recall a company in Wales was leveraging stepper motor concepts, but a few years have passed and I don’t recall seeing any more press. Likewise, there was a good deal of academic, and work in Japan has gotten a lot of press. In most cases cost balance is still not there. For example, the removal of rare earth materials and the overall efficiency gains were not yet offset due to increased manufacturing costs in some cases, and the new operating costs were not fully offset by higher control costs in others. I seem to remember market projections were of the typical top down sort, where the most cost-insensitive applications, like transportation, are to be the catalysts and scaling comes as always with cost efficiency and downmarket applications.
Any breakthrough that could push the trend quickly into consumer products would be huge.
As a side note, the engineer in me always gets excited with system and cycle efficiencies derived from thermal gains. Outside of fuel savings, regenerative breaking designs in transportation shift mechanically caused heat loses to energy generation. Likewise, motor efficiency on a broad scale will reduce heat generation. In some cases, there could be secondary benefits. I can recall being in industrial pump rooms, for example, where a tremendous amount of generated heat was either vented, or required additional cooling to maintain reasonable work environments. Even with consumer products the gains can be non-trivial.
Electric motor design is very much driven by application and product development. Few companies are making general-use motors. Mechanical load is so specific that is hard to match an off the shelf motor to it. Your example is just one showing efficiency was sacrificed for other reasons like cost and availability.
So “breakthrough” should be cautiously used for a specific class or field, not to all motors.
Craig, with the latest technological developments it is possible to achieve a better output performance from motors. Sure less space, use of rare materials, lighter, hazard free, etc… Are what costs more. It is logical. But the real problem is that most techies always look for complicated solutions rather than simple ones. I’m not different. But I always tell myself to K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Silly). When I do, I get the cheapest and simplest solution with something that works.
The next step would be to improve the solution with better and cheaper material. Usually, I get ready made elements for other uses any fix onto whatever I’m developing.
An example. When I built my first helical twisted vertical axis wind turbine I wanted to use a heat dump for access power. A good heat dump load was the water heater element. But the element was rated 1,200 Watts. Too big for my turbine. As I was walking down the supermarket, the instant coffee heater element drew my attention. It was 500 Watts. A perfect solution when one is building a prototype. The 500 Watt element can be used for solar dump or utility power with a controller. Less than $10 for the element.