Metal Amorphous Nanocomposite Soft Magnetic Material-Enabled High Power Density, Rare Earth Free Rotational Machines

Metal amorphous nanocomposites (MANCs) are promising soft magnetic materials (SMMs) for power electronic applications offering low power loss at high frequency and maintaining a relatively high flux density. While applications in certain motor designs have been recently modeled, their widespread application awaits scaled manufacturing of MANC materials and proliferation of new higher speed motor designs. A hybrid motor design based on permanent magnets and doubly salient stator and rotor is reported here to develop a compact (a factor of 10 smaller than currently possible in Si steels), high-speed (>1 kHz, electrical), high-power (>2.5 kW) motor by incorporating low loss (<;10 W/kg at 1 kHz) MANCs such as recently reported Fe-Ni-based alloys. A feature of this motor design is flux focusing from the permanent magnet allowing use of lower energy permanent magnet chosen from among non-rare earth containing compositions and attractive due to constraints posed by rare earth criticality. A 2-D finite element analysis model reported here indicates that a 2.5 kW hybrid motor may be built with a permanent magnet with a 0.4 T remanence at a rotor speed of 6000 rpm. At a magnetic switching frequency of 1.4 kHz, the core loss may be limited to <;3 W by selecting an appropriate MANC SMM. The projected efficiency exceeds 96% not including power loss in the controller. Under full load conditions, the flux density distributions for the SMM stay predominantly <;1.3 T, the saturation magnetization of optimized FeNi-based MANC alloys. The maximum demagnetizing field in the permanent magnet is less than 2.2 × 10
⁵
A/m sustainable, for example, with a high-grade hard ferrite magnet.