Grant: Alliance Grants

Electric propulsion opens new possibilities for aircraft design that improves flight envelope, safety and efficiency by allowing multiple distributed propellers, redundancy, and hybridization of the energy source. However, the weight of the systems must be reduced to achieve these benefits. A key system that needs to be as light as possible is the electric motor system, independently from the source of electric power. During the last NSERC Alliance collaborative project, the academic and industrial team has developed a novel rotor architecture that doubles the tangential speed over current ultra-high-speed motor and a micro-channel air-cooled stator that eliminates the need for a liquid cooling system. These two new technologies enable tripling the power density of the power system (motor, inverter, gearbox and the cooling system) compared to a direct drive motor. In this context, the present project now aims at validating the key technologies of the motor and inverter to address the key challenges, namely (1) increasing winding filling factor, (2) increase rotor life, (3) reducing vibration, and (4) develop adapted power electronics. Successful results from this project will reduce uncertainties about the novel technologies sufficiently to launch a technology demonstration project at full scale dedicated to the development of an increased performance hybrid vertical take-off and landing aircraft. During the first ten years of commercialization of the technology, 158 kt of CO2 in Quebec, and 3 Mt worldwide, are expected to be avoided in the hard-to-decarbonize aeronautic sector. Finally, this project will train 8 highly qualified research engineers in the rapidly expanding field of electric powertrains, in particular in their capacity to develop novel technologies required to solve current and upcoming challenges and position Canada industry as a leader in the field.