Another semester finished. Balance time and my first paper.

We finally wrapped up our group works. Yes, we dragged our feet like sloths on this one (school ended almost two months ago). Or rather, we definitely bit off more than our part-time researcher lives allow us to chew.
Anyway, if you’d like to read the more or less full account of our work in the [...]

Genetic mangling of electric motors

As has been said before, we’ve taken an Intelligent Algorithm approach to our motor design framework.
We started by adding a Genetic Algorithm to the MotorFemmulator project code, and left it running on a 7 computer improvised cluster. It has yielded some results, namely the optimization of a motor from 44Nm (5kW) to 200Nm (23kW) at [...]

Overcoming FEMM limitations

Just like any other software, FEMM has its limitations.
I’ve been talking a lot to David Meeker, the author, who has been extremely kind and thoughtful in guiding me not only in the program’s usage but also in general electromagnetic modeling, while trying to sort out the modeling mess I’ve put myself and my colleague into [...]

Problem reduction

So, we’re still hammering the motor model in school. You can always take a peek here.
We’ve decided early on to drop the Opti-Y optimization suite in favor of good old fashioned homegrown Octave scripts. On one hand, Opti-Y didn’t look friendly to Linux at all, and on the other hand we wanted to leverage our [...]

The wheelmotor goes to school

I finally got the chance to officially push my wheelmotor project into my master’s.
By an incredible strike of luck, I teamed up with a class mate that is also extremely interested in sustainable energy and electric propulsion; not only that but he also has experience in Octave development and is keen in applying that to [...]

Hybrid Electric Motors?!

Well, what do you know, there actually exist hybrid motors!
Basically, when an electric motor has a stator with both electromagnets and permanent magnets, that’s a hybrid motor. It’s called hybrid because it is a cross-breed between a Permanent Magnet Motor and a Variable Reluctance Motor (which has a purely ferromagnetic rotor with salient [...]

A new (contributed) hub motor

After a 3 week intensive sprint and with a little help from me, Pierre has finalized his own motor model and it is now available in the repository. He also contributed a couple of small tweaks to my common Lua “libraries”. The GPL wins again.
I helped out as much as I could (with [...]

A map for my code

Pierre has told me it is difficult to understand my Lua scripts without a better explanation of what each variable means. He expressed a wish for a drawing that maps the variables to the geometry. I agree this is necessary, it just hadn’t been until now because nobody else dared to go into my code! [...]

Back to school

I realized it is almost impossible for a family man with a full-time job to pull this project together in useful time, especially when trying to develop a crucial and complex component such as the hub motor.
So I’m changing my life in order to accommodate the project.

Model simulation results, part 1

At the request of many families, here are some results.
The following results where compiled like this:

The FEMM scripts simulated the “Halbach Rotor” (HR) and the “Sparse Rotor” (SR) motor models while exploring several variable variations (like I explained before), dumping the results to file; Used constants where 50 turns per stator tooth and [...]