This project aims to reduce the use of rare earth magnets and copper, two commonly used critical materials in electric motors. On one hand, alternative motor designs are introduced that contain less of these critical materials, and on the other hand, the use of reversible fixation techniques is examined to improve the recyclability of both critical and non-critical materials.

Emphasis on the use of rare earth-free existing permanent magnet materials such as ferrites and new permanent magnet materials such as iron-nitride, whether or not combined with electric excitation, will result in new motor designs. These motor designs will be added to design tool library for electric motors. The performance criteria and cost of resulting motor designs will be evaluated and compared with existing motors as a reference. In specific motor applications where specifications do not allow for completely avoiding rare earth based permanent magnets, reversible adhesive techniques will be proposed to enhance the recyclability of these material fractions.

As an alternative to copper conductors in the windings, the focus is on using green aluminum. Concurrently, research is conducted on the electrical insulation material and the impregnation method of motor windings with a focus on compatibility with aluminum windings and the processing impact of both the production and recycling phases. Therefore, alternative insulation materials such as PEEK, and particularly alumina, and new reversible winding impregnation processes are examined in this project: the electrical and thermal material properties are characterized, and the processing of these materials is investigated in both the production and recycling phases.

Ultimately, two motor designs representative for the consortium, a remanufactured 7.5 kW industrial motor and a 150 kW EV motor, will be built and evaluated to illustrate the possibilities of the proposed technical innovations.

The project is named AlExci, because Aluminum and Excitation systems are two key words in the answer to the question “How to build an electric motor with less critical materials?”