12 ms·
Hunstable Electric Turbine can produce up to 3x the torque of other motors
- yalok 7y agoNice to see Brad making a dent in a completely different domain, after having had a successful video streaming company.
- JoachimS 7y agoPrevious discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20660403 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20660403
- justlexi93 7y agoThe motors are not really taking up a lot of useful space in the car and are not underpowered by any stretch so this tech needs to be price competitive. Like Hyundai said batteries are where we need to see advances. Don't get me wrong it is interesting and I am glad to see advances but I don't see this as a terribly useful advance today.
- yetihehe 7y agoI see it as a BIG advance for small drones. The same torque from smaller engine where every gram counts is a big win, you can replace that weight with more battery.
- kragen 7y agoWhat counts there is power density, not torque density, isn't it? Quadcopters don't typically gear their motors down, instead preferring to pitch the rotors at shallow angles of attack.
- yetihehe 7y agoSo, better for racing drones, they will be able to change speed of propellers faster, they already use higher angles to readuce propeller speed (gyroscopic effects are killing maneuvring). Shallow angles are better for efficiency.
- Tepix 7y agoGetting rid of a gearbox that weighs 70kg seems like a significant weight saving. They also claim more efficiency which could result in smaller batteries or more range.
- Shivetya 7y agoWell got to admit, the standard exaggerated imagery implies large battery savings where we really do not know how much it could imply and I bet it would be a big stretch to hit double digits. They may save on reduction gearing but recently Porsche went the other way by adding in a two speed transmission so as to improve high speed efficiency. Electrics would tend towards requiring heavier duty transmissions common to diesels simply because of torque but a good application of multiple gears in a transmission could benefit EVs depending again, on application. We would need to see the amount of electricity being consumed at different load levels and compare the cost of a transmission to increased batteries as to which is best for it. Personally, the less parts the better.
- Cthulhu_ 7y agoIn practice, "battery savings" will translate to "we'll do more with the same battery life"; see also: smartphones who have gotten 1000x as fast over the past decade (or whatever) and still only manage a day of intense use on a battery.
- zelos 7y agoPossibly useful for hybrids where you're trying to squeeze an electric motor in next to an existing ICE?
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoPerhaps it has its place -low-velocity lightweight vehicles? They are starting with a scooter, so perhaps they agree.
- auiya 7y agoThe main use would be exactly what the article says - a higher output generator for when windmills operate at slow speeds. The car motor conceptualizations are purely there for click bait.
- nerpderp82 7y agoCars are not where a motor like this will be applied. Exoskeletons, shoes, airplanes will all need lightweight, high power density, high torque, gear free motors.
- jacobush 7y agoStill cool if the gearbox can be omitted in car applications.
- Narkov 7y agoDo EV's have gearboxes?
- Gibbon1 7y agoI think usually a single reduction gear, sometimes a differential.
- thesz 7y agoYes, they do and easy to screw up. Learn about first model of Tesla Roadster - it was quite speedy up to 160 km/h and then not speedy at all. All because of the wrong gearbox. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Roadster_(2008)#Transmission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Roadster_(2008)#Transmis...
- jansan 7y agoPorsche Taycan has a two-speed gearbox, probably developed by or with Rimac.
- JoachimS 7y agoSome do, some don't. The Koenigsegg hybrid (so not strictly an EV, but can be operated as a pure EV) famously don't have a gearbox but a single, fixed reduction gear. There is a hydraulic coupling for the electrical motors to allow slow speeds. At higher speeds the coupling is mechanically locked to directly connect all engines to the wheels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koenigsegg_Regera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koenigsegg_Regera https://www.koenigsegg.com/car/regera/ https://www.koenigsegg.com/car/regera/
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- balfirevic 7y ago
- VLM 7y agoThe key quote from the linked article seems to be "It’s essentially two concentric radial motors bookended by two axial ones." My question is where's the cooling? You can put more magnetic field and torque into an ever smaller area, always true, but still going to have to dump heat out via some path. And the bigger the path for whatever is cooling, the lower the magnetic flux density and torque. So I'd be interested in hearing how the cooling system works. Its not like their copper is more conductive than everyone elses copper, LOL. yetihehe suggests drone use, plenty of air movement there. Some of the quotes in the article sound very aerospace. Everyone is dancing around the concept without saying it, that the main advantage of removing or downsizing the gear train is along the lines of aerospace style "simplicate and add lightness" which is often much more expensive than it sounds. For example, imagine an electric general aviation airplane, you can't have problems man-rating the electric gearbox if your electric Cessna-172 doesn't even HAVE a gearbox between the electric motor and prop. Likewise for EVs, complete elimination of the gearbox would seem to eliminate all gearbox related maintenance and repairs. Honestly, the car manufacturers might not be amused at the concept of selling fewer more reliable cars. (Edited to add, also see car racing entertainment, if you enter an EV in a popular automobile race, you can't drop out of the race due to gearbox failure if you have no gearbox to fail... is that good or bad for ratings?)
- redis_mlc 7y agoGenerally speaking, airplane engines avoid gearboxes for reliability reasons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geared_turbofan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geared_turbofan
- FlyMoreRockets 7y agoUnlike helicopters, where they are used to drive the tail rotor. Even though dual disk helicopters don't need a tail rotor, they still need a gearbox to balance torque between the disks.
- bkev 7y agoA conventional helicopter might not need to drive the tail rotor mechanically in this manner for much longer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJUgmeSYox4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJUgmeSYox4
- mrfusion 7y agoHaven’t I heard robotics needs more powerful motors to be viable? At least for household uses.
- ithkuil 7y agoLarger power density also means less weight for the same power.
- hwillis 7y agoLight expert analysis of this motor (it's nothing special and not manufacturable): https://www.anttilehikoinen.fi/technology/evaluation-of-the-linear-labs-het-motor/ https://www.anttilehikoinen.fi/technology/evaluation-of-the-...
- rndmio 7y agoHaving read the article you linked that seems to be a misrepresentative summary of it.
- murkt 7y agoYep, I've also read the linked article and for me the summary is more like "HET motor has some interesting ideas, some difficulties, some claims are incorrect and it's probably a bit difficult to manufacture."
- hwillis 7y agoInteresting ideas- kind of, but the interesting ideas are not new. Dimensionality is one of the oldest formulated motor-related problems. Hybrid rotors are certainly an active area. The motor is a pretty novel and clever way to draw all these things together, but it's not the kind of thing to build a product around. Some difficulties- these are fundamental issues. They are fundamentally unsolvable with the suggested architecture. Eg anything that adds cooling back in will conflict with the rotors or coils. On manufacturability: > Flux paths in the teeth seem very much 3-dimensional, which would require sintered materials to be used to limit eddy-current losses. This really belies how much of a fucking nightmare this would be. First, an unrelated area of development: grain-oriented electrical steels have 30% higher permeability (in one direction) than non-oriented steels. People are actively looking to ways to orient steel grains into the arches necessary to make a motor, because even small improvements in permeability can lead to smaller and more efficient motors. A 30% improvement would be incredible, and justify a large cost increase since the cost of motors is effectively determined by the electricity usage. The permeability of sintered soft materials is at best ~1/10th that of the electrical steel used in motors. So... thats a huge issue. Its also much more expensive. Its also mechanically unsuitable for high torque motors, because it's weak and brittle. It also has much higher losses. The shape of the stator would also require entirely new technologies to even make. Die-sintered powders are very precise in two axes- since you're pressing into a mould, you can rely on near-thousandth repeatable tolerances once you have accounted for shrinkage after sintering (which can take multiple tries to get right). That third axis is a real bitch. Powder will never be consistent; you cant apply hundreds of tonnes of pressing force and be precise to thousandths of an inch, and even if you can get the force repeatable the compressability of powders varies too much between batches due to grain shape and size, temperature, additives, humidity... And even if it was consistent, you cant design for that. You can only adjust a ten thousand dollar mould after the fact. And that z dimension is the most critical, since any asymmetry will cause uneven forces on the axle bearings. In a normal motor you can trivially be off by several hundredths of an inch because the axial force is negligible. In this design a thou will cause a large force imbalance, so each motor will need to be a precision part. Even variations inside the rotor will cause large vibrations, so sintering + heat treating will be a nightmare. Not to mention that the magnets will have to be matched individually, both for size/thickness and permeability tolerance. If my boss wanted me to produce this thing, I'd quit.
- extropy 7y agoCall me when they have put it on a dyno next to a Tesla or some other reasonably efficient EV powertrain. Until then total snake oil crying for attention.
- awefiawejfl 7y agoReminds me of another "revolutionary new motor design" from a few years ago that promised greater efficiency than any other motor ever built. That one had an out-of-context praise blurb from an MIT professor, which is clearly better than an out-of-context praise blurb from a UT professor. At best, this is a solution in search of a problem. And until it's tested and certified by an independent party, it's not even that. The whole company reeks of dumb-money snake oil and I'm putting this in the same category as Juicero.
- londons_explore 7y agoNot all new motor design promises are trash though. The brushless DC outrunner motor, which used to be a niche design due to the complexity of the control circuits and expense of permanent magnets now seems to be used in nearly everything new. Most electric cars are moving towards it, electric bikes, hoverboards and escooters, and it's used in every drone, some electric powertools, etc. I think it will be in next-gen trains, and will become the 'standard' motor to replace current uses of AC synchronous motors in factories, mostly due to its ability to brake and regen power when stopping, meaning it gets less hot.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoSo I was wondering whether "Hunstable" is some new technical term like "h-unstable", or some kind of wordplay on "unstable". Turns out it's just the surname of the creators.