LaunchPoint Coreless Axial Flux Motor

Here's a PDF with some information on the LaunchPoint motor:



Kv is 60 rpm/Volt

Good stuff there Miles,
The performance #s on page 7 are stunning.
I see it is standard 3 phase also.
hmnnnn. I may have to study the manufacture of specialty magnets
secret sauce reverse engineering underway.
(it cant be imposable- but again,I am impressed by the guys who grind their own telescope lenses)

My, that's a pretty motor. Love the venting, very elegant use of the centrifugal flow. That Halbach array is also very nice, but that'd be close to impossible to replicate on a DIY basis. I doubt you'd be able to find wedge-shaped 45-degree magnetized Neo magnets anywhere this side of special-order.

I'm noticing a pattern here. The really, insanely high-efficiency motors seem to prefer the Halbach array for light weight and low losses. Their data also seem to indicate that it does actually generate a higher flux density, which I did not realize.

now i am probably missing something but my simple math already has me spending 150 plus just to get one set of magnets for the silly inrunner setup i wanna try

properly polarized wedges to give us halbach in the od we want i cannot find BUT (gonna go look for link but betting some one already knows it)
i did stumble accross a custom neo magnet maker that quoted $500 setup to make custom magnets with a competative price per piece after that.
come the new year id be more than willing to do a group buy to spread out that initial layout

I have already contacted them regarding manufacture of these. They offer both domestic and foreign factories, and are tooling a motor that would be perfect for our use with single stage reductions. Pretty low NRE for getting specific windings, so it seems like a great design to go with.

Group buy for the first round anybody? I stated about three months before I would want to start production (after christmas hobby rush) since I have the bulk of my capital tied in some hobby controllers ATM. Group buy would circumvent this.

$150 sunds high for magnets enoob, what are you looking at buying? especialy for an inrunner. How many poles are you designing with?
I recall that custom magnets were available when looking at windmill stuffs, $500 doesn't seem to bad (speaking as "group" shared investment)if we were to figure an optimal set up. like 30 poles a 12 degrees & a modified in/out radius. I wonder what the min. requred purchase would be? That would still be some serious bucks for the set of 8 to create the halbach effect. It would be nice to have an insider in the industry to procure some "samples :wink: "

if im right there is no minimum . 500 to setup and rather good price per piece after that . of course bulk orders talk.

im about to start a thread on where i may spend 150 on magnets.

So many threads, is this the Lunchpoint Actual Flush Stoner Thread? :?

Hey John,
Can you tell us a little more about these motors? Would they be willing to sell you a sample motor to test so that we can be sure it suits our needs? Were you quoted any prices? This is exactly what we need here, nice and thin.

It will be a while before they're available to us, etard........

Info from the PDF Says

7hp @ 8400rpm
1.4 lbs

Loving those numbers.

Any estimate or idea on HP at 100-600rpm range?

Controller?
Can it use existing controller or does it need custom?

Either way this baby looks good.

Just over 1 kW at 2000 rpm.

Somewhere around 250 Watts at 500 rpm (assuming you can get rid of the heat....).

You could run it with an RC ESC but efficiency would be better with a sinusoidal controller.

Found a video here.


http://www.youtube.com/user/geoffreyalong#p/a/u/0/Sjm5Y3BHpc8

Thanks for that, Micro.

Good to see that the prototype is up and running, now.

Hi,

An early test up to about 2000 rpm with an RC airplane ESC

Click to expand...

Kim would love the noise at 8.5k rpm

I would be in for a group by

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Hi,
I had a question about your motor here (http://www.launchpnt.com/capabilities/electric-motor-design.html)

Do you guys have any plans for releasing and electric bicycle version of this motor?

I am part of an online electric bicycle community ( http://endless-sphere.com/forums/ ) and the shape,

and power to weight ratio just sound excellent for an electric bike hub motor application.

Thank you for your time, and any info or ideas would be awesome!

-Max
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Max,

Electric bikes is one of the potential markets we’ve been investigating for the motor.

Presently we are focused mainly on electric aircraft applications as the business drivers make more sense for that application. Initial production of the motor will obviously be expensive, so we need to pursue a market that can afford a more expensive motor, and aircraft have a much higher $/lb that almost any vehicle except a spacecraft, so the weight savings are worth more.

The motor technology is great and we’re really excited about it, right now we’re mainly held back by business (read: “dollars”) considerations. We are close to getting a contract to develop a larger version of the motor, which will get us a lot further along the development process.

I did some quick scanning through your forums and it looks like there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on. I noticed some discussions of a “group buy” of motors… Our problem to date has been that most of the people we contact want one motor, and we can’t possibly tool up for them and deliver a motor at a reasonable cost. We’re a small company, and thus quite flexible in our dealings as long as we can somehow not lose money doing it. Someday we might be able to consider doing an e-bike version if a group of hobbyists could get together, decide on a common spec, and order a larger quantity.

At the present, unless you’re really avid about it and want to spend money experimenting, it would probably be premature.

We have run our prototype as a generator up to about 6600 RPM, making > 6 N*m of torque. At this operating point it was somewhat above 90% efficient, creating about 4 kW of real power and about 4.5 KVA of apparent power. (Our load bank had some inductance and thus drew some reactive power from the generator.) From this data we know that the basic design works well—it will operate as a motor almost exactly the same as it operates in generator mode (assuming we have a good sinusoidal drive—trapezoidal drive will reduce efficiency by about 8%).

However, there are still a lot of details that need to be refined—mechanics of the hub, the holding of the stator disk, etc. etc.—that could make the motor fail prematurely in real-world use. This prevents us from wanting to make additional copies that go beyond lab testing until we’ve gotten the money and time to really “beat up” the motor in real world conditions and do a few design iterations on the things that will inevitably fail in HALT testing.

If you have any ideas on what you guys think an ideal e-bike motor spec would be, I’d like to hear it. We’ve done some research into the market, so we have some ideas; but I wouldn’t mind hearing your opinion. Things like continuous torque, peak torque, and stall torque requirements as well as speed requirements would be interesting to know. Also, there are serious trade-offs between direct drive versus geared—in general gearing make the motor much smaller and lighter, and the reduction in motor weight is much more than the weight of the gears—so if you are going for lowest weight solution a gearbox is almost essential. From the analysis I’ve done, direct drive only makes sense if you are going for very high efficiency during ‘cruise” mode i.e. >95% electric->mechanical energy conversion while running at full speed. (At 0 speed efficiency is always “0”, and the lightest way to get high starting torque will always be with a gearbox…)

Other applications for direct drive might be extremely long life applications where the gearbox can not be kept lubricated; but I doubt that this applies to e-bikes.

I’ve also considered making a brushed version of this motor—industry has gone heavily into the brushless motors because they have almost no wearing components and have no brushes to wear out. But machines in industry must run 1000’s of hours and maintenance is expensive. I believe the e-bike industry probably fits better into the consumer world, where brushed motors still reign supreme. (Ever worried about the brushed in the motor in your electric drill wearing out? I didn’t think so….) Any guesses how many hours someone (normal e-bike customer, not RAAM rider) might reasonably put on an e-bike?

Anyway, I appreciate your interest, you can pass on any thoughts your forum group has to me and we’ll take it into consideration. Check back in a couple of months and we can give you an update on how our development work under contract is going. What we learn doing that project should put us closer to being able to confidently manufacture a _product_ instead of a lab demo, at which point we can entertain low volume orders from customers such as yourself.

Best regards,
Michael Ricci, P.E.
VP Engineering
Launchpoint Technologies
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Above email posted with permission of Michael Ricci.

Up for discussion...

Bump for above!

I got the same answer a few months back- contact us in a few months. I have been in contact with them on and off for quite some time now. Basically they do not have production capability, nor the money to start.

So what would be a decent group buy, 50 units? 1000 units? I couldn't really get any answers from Mike when I asked, and I am assuming that they don't know either. Great product, no money behind it yet.

Count me in for a group buy...i would take 10 if those performance numbers are real.

FYI
Neumotors aren't that far off in power to weight
They are about 2.9 hp per lb sustained and 5.5 hp per lb surge.

Hi,
We just posted some additional information about our dual halbach axial flux motor on our redesigned web site (in the FAQ/TechBlog section).
http://www.launchpnt.com/techblog/
Sorry, no new developments since VoKuS posted my email conversation with him back in February, although we are continually talking to various potential funding sources and there's always something "just around the corner"; it just hasn't happened quite yet.
We will try to keep interested folks posted (you can sign up to follow us on Twitter if you're so inclined...)

Mike Ricci, P.E.
VP Engineering
Launchpoint Technologies

Thanks for the excellent FAQ, Mike.

I had some correspondence with Geoff Long, a while ago. Is he no longer with LaunchPoint?

FYI :

http://www.launchpnt.com/portfolio/transportation/halbach-electric-motor/

It has Specs as well as presentation included.

Anyone tried to build this kind?

https://www.google.com/search?sitesearch=endless-sphere.com&q=Halback Array Motor

Look beyond your nose. KF

Insanely hard to build
You get to placing the last magnet and then it doesnt fit

No way practical for now