SBIR Phase I: Designing High Efficiency Small Scale Motors using Switched Reluctance Technology

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.