EV news, page-29

Took a fewother articles to fully understand this. This is a still a 3 phasemotor the same as Tesla has used in all their cars except model 3. Model 3 has a transmission. Other Tesla models have no transmission and lots of low end torque and meets all the other specs as well. This is a substantial improvement on the 3 Phase that tesla uses but it is done by just changing the internal field generating copper. The 3 phase has always been a fair alternative to PMMs. This motor may or may or may not displace some sales of PMMs. I actually think that the wind turban is very interesting. Many on this board will tell you that a non PMG motor needs a transmission and transmission fail. The fact is PMG had nothing to do with eliminating transmissions. Two things happened at once. One was PMG. Other was advances in Solid state devices , making inexpensive reliable conversion of DC to AC power doable at high voltage and power levels. The decision to run DC generators coincided with the switch over to PMGs, before this time generators produced line frequency either 50 HZ or 60 HZ. Hence no transmissions now. Coper based DC Generators can produce more power over a wider rpm range. They are about 2% to 3 % less efficient. Since the input is free is this in the top 3 or 4 as far as importance?

Changes are occurringvery fast no one knows what will dominate in the future. 30 years ago no one thought we would ever use reluctance motors again. Yet now with a small amount of PM material they are a real contender. It is interesting what is responsible for the reemergence of the reluctance motor. It is a small fairly fast Digital Signal Processor, DSP, created for the solar field to optimize panel output. This processor can monitor a panel and quickly make changes caused by load or a cloud moving quickly overhead. IN motors it can also monitor load, position, battery state, current and voltages, and make 1000 of changes a second to the power driving the motor. This has also boosted the performance of PMM especially 3 phase brushless PMMs. Unlikely that any prediction of a solution even a year or two out will be correct with the rate of change in this industry.

I feel thatright now with the SS devices available higher voltages and lower currents arethe way to handle large amounts of power. That does not mean that there will not be break through that can handle the higher currents. I do not see it coming in even 5 years but we will see. Any advance in supper conductors that are inexpensive and operate at high temps could change this dramatically. Who knows maybe something totally unseen will show up. Low cost Supper conductors would also give a tremendous advantage to current fields over PMs.

Please notethere is much talk about higher temp supper conductors. The current ones are still less than -135C. JMO but to be practical in autos or wind they would have to operate over -40C maybe 0 C. In the lab H₃S has achieved super conducting state at -70C so they are coming.