Automotive Engineering - March 2023 - 17
COVER STORY
Inside Infinitum's Air-Core motor
showing its thin PCB stators.
HVAC units, compressors and material-handling applications. Current
partners include Rockwell, Caterpillar and Chevron.
At CES 2023 in January, Infinitum announced its latest step forward.
Its Air-Core motor, paired with the PCB stator, is a liquid-cooling
system that channels coolant directly to the motor's heat source.
" We inject the coolant into a hollow shaft and release it over the entire
area of the stator. That lets us get four to five times the power
density of a traditional radial-flux motor, " Schuler asserted.
Most other cooling methods on radial and axial-flux motors only
get coolant into a jacket around the motor. Once Infinitum's system
gets coolant to the center of the stator, centrifugal force pushes the
liquid to an outer jacket, where it drains into a sump to be recirculated.
The result is a motor with 150 kW (201 hp) continuous and 300
kW (402 hp) peak power that runs with 95% efficiency at 7500 rpm.
Schuler clarified that Infinitum is not the first to develop a PCB
stator, but first to " productize it in an effective way for a market. "
The company, which holds 32 patents with 44 patents pending, believes
it is the first to deploy a PCB stator and liquid cooling in the
same package.
The Air-Core motor uses silicon-carbide MOSFETs to enable
switching at a higher speed. " That allows us to overcome the lack of
inductance and operate the stator effectively, " he said. The motor
also can receive over-the-air updates.
The size of the motor, or whether to use multiple smaller motors
instead of one larger one, is driven by the application. " There are practically
no limits on the technology from the technical perspective, "
Schuler said. " We are an axial-flux machine, so we tend to be a larger
diameter and a shorter length. "
In some industrial applications, it's far better to have ten 10-hp motors
than a fan driven by a single 100-hp motor. He said that having multiples
does allow redundancy, helpful in many applications such as eVTOLs.
AUTOMOTIVE ENGINEERING
The Air-Core motor is designed for a circular life
cycle. The copper laminate panels are etched using
off-the-shelf FR4 glass epoxy as insulation. This results
in ten times the reliability of a standard stator, the
company said. Why? " All of our copper laminate and
insulation has an equal coefficient of thermal expansion.
As it heats and cools over and over, it does that
at the same rate. That means no mechanical interference
is ever created, which means it will never fail, "
Schuler said.
As for the ramp-up to the mobility market, which
Schuler says could benefit even more than the HVAC
market from the Aircore Mobility Motor's efficiency,
the company is willing to license the technology and
already has a handful of agreements with OEMs in the
commercial trucking, eVTOL and other markets, for
which they expect to deliver units in the second and
third quarters this year.
Schaeffler: Systems efficiencies
At Schaeffler Group, historically a provider of stampings
and advanced bearings, e-motor development is
coming fast and hard. The company is applying its
expertise to traction motors that optimize established
materials and achieve more efficiency via a higher degree
of systems integration.
Jeff Hemphill, CTO of the Americas, said Schaeffler
is looking to make permanent-magnet motors more
efficient, by misaligning the magnets, for example.
And it also is directing attention to externally excited
March 2023 17
INFINITUM
Automotive Engineering - March 2023
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