CASE STUDY: Aiding Development of Sustainable Electric Motors (Advanced Electric Machines)
Overview
SPECIFIC works with companies with low-carbon technologies to help them bring their product to market through access to world-class facilities and skills.
Advanced Electric Machines (AEM) delivers truly sustainable electric motor technologies with market leading performance, designed to be used in a range of applications from passenger cars to aerospace. As AEM motors are copper and rare earth magnet free, they are more sustainable while meeting or exceeding the performance of other motors on the market.
AEM’s ultra high-speed passenger car motor uses unique laminations for its rotor design. These laminations need to be coated with a liquid lacquer to provide interlaminar insulation and ensure good adhesion between layers for longevity and robustness.
To produce a prototype of the new motor design AEM needed support from SPECIFIC with the coating stage. SPECIFIC’s coating expertise and industrial coating facilities meant we supported AEM in identifying both the coating thickness required and cure of the lacquer to best fit their application. Once identified we produced a batch of laminations, with the bulk being produced over a 2-day period with personnel from AEM supporting the process. The production was monitored throughout to ensure we stayed within the required tolerances and the laminations were shipped to AEM for the next stage of the prototype construction.
Advanced Electric Machines is now working with its supply chain to demonstrate the performance capabilities of the new passenger car motor using the laminations coated at SPECIFIC.
Project partners: Advanced Electric Machines
Aims:
- Carry out trials to ensure optimum coating thicknesses and cure temperatures for the laminations in this specific application.
- Coat a batch of laminations using our industrial coating equipment to support AEM with the production of their new prototype motor.
Impact:
- AEM has successfully built a prototype motor, allowing them to test its performance and collect data, optimise its design, and demonstrate its performance to potential customers.
- AEM has an improved understanding of the coating process and the impacts it has on its motor designs.
- Once the motor is finalised, AEM will have a new-to-market product.
- Successful demonstration of the prototype motor helped AEM to secure £23 million of investment to support the scale up of its production capacity.
Above: SPECIFIC researchers using our industrial roller coaters to coat the AEM laminations.