SBIR-STTR Award

The broader impact/commercial potential of this project are that 1 to 5 hp motors represent 58% of the total number of installed motors in the United States due to the prevalence of heating and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. A 10-15% improvement in efficiency in these systems is expected to save more than $1000 in electricity over the 10-year lifetime of each motor. As such, installing this motor in just 1% of applications would translate to $500M / year in electricity savings and result in a reduction of more than 1 million tons / year of carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. alone. In addition, since the device uses ?internet of things? microprocessors it can potentially be connected to a broader network, allowing monitoring and tuning to efficiency to be done in a manner not possible with traditional motor designs. This means that changes can be made in motor software, or learning algorithms can be applied in industry-specific settings to further improve performance over time. This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will aim to address a number of unsolved research problems with switched reluctance (SR) electric motors at small scale (1 to 5 hp). Specifically, the proposed research will develop optimization and control algorithms for a novel high pole ?HR-SR? motor utilizing low-cost microprocessors of the type used in ?internet of things? applications. These algorithms will address control issues that remain unsolved for such motors including torque ripple, high speed real-time control, and non-linear performance. This is an unsolved issue since 1 ? 5 hp motors have low angular momentum and require high speed sensing and adjustment as well as real-time optimization to achieve high efficiency. (There are no such designs commercially manufactured today.) This research will also perform analysis of the physical design of HR-SR motors using finite element analysis to optimize the mechanical design of the motor, reduce noise and heat levels and increase efficiency. The proposed approach will produce a low-cost design that has better efficiency than high-cost ECM motors, but at the price point of low-cost low-efficiency induction motor designs.

The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is to revolutionize the efficiency of electric motors in the heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) market. The innovation technology area is a new class of electric motor and control hardware and software that is based on switched reluctance technology, exhibiting very high efficiencies of 90%+ across a broad range of speeds. This innovation will enhance scientific understanding by showing how this new class of electric motors can be optimized to minimize noise and vibration, while allowing variable speed control and Internet connectivity. The potential societal impacts of such a technology are significant: more than half the new motors purchased each year in the United States are 1-5 horsepower motors (1.024M of 1.792M), and they collectively account for nearly 25% of the United States electricity consumption. As such, if commercialized this technology could save retail and commercial organizations millions of dollars a year in electricity savings due to efficiency improvements. The benefits for an adoption rate of just 5% of available applications are $500M / year in electricity savings and 1M tons / year of carbon savings.This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase 2 project aims to research a new type of electric motor with a high rotor pole switched reluctance (HRSRM) design. This HRSRM motor has a simplified physical construction with no permanent magnets but complex electronics that manage the torque and speed in the motor through carefully timed generation of magnetic fields. This class of motors have proven extremely difficult to research because of highly nonlinear response characteristics, and sensitivity to very small changes in timing, electromagnetics, and physical setup. This project will research methods for adapting dynamic control algorithms to increase the speed and sensitivity of the power electronics to manage these characteristics. Research will also examine physical elements of the design and build a generalized simulation model combining both finite element analysis as well as structural modeling, constrained mode analysis and vibration models to reduce and optimize noise, vibration and harshness measures. Finally this project will optimize the ~600 key parameters associated with an HRSRM motor, allowing the rapid design and prototyping of new motor designs in minutes rather than months.