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Energy & Grid Management
Norbert Vasen
Norbert Vasen
·Posted in Energy & Grid Management
Tue, Jan 19

Bringing the Tesla Model 3 electric motor as the next work horse into the industry

Is the Tesla battery only in the EV? No. It went also into many homes and even large storage projects.
What about the Tesla electric motor? Especially the Model 3 work horse has some characteristics to be applied in industry. If that is true, should also this piece of technology be brought outside the EV?

Let’s see what this motor is like. You can look for yourself on the Youtube 12 minute video “Tesla Model 3's motor - The Brilliant Engineering behind it” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esUb7Zy5Oio. To say it in a few words: it has a very good torque on the start AND at high speed it is much more efficient than the usual induction motor with a cage rotor. There are many applications where this is interesting. For example the millions of fans and pumps.

I have been 5 years in simulating magnetic fields with the Finite Element Simulation software Ansys. It was a long time ago but in the above video, seeing the magnetic lines flow through the motor, I felt thrilled by the idea to transfer also this technology into an application that is certainly as important as home and industrial storage systems. Electrical motors are really the main part of energy consumption, certainly in industry: pumps, fans, chillers, you name it, which have a (big) electric motor. 
It might be a problem to produce so much permanent magnets, which require raw materials that are scarce. But let’s do one step at a time. Who of the EnergyCentral readers would agree on this idea of technology transfer, is their something wrong in my reasoning? Who would take up this task? Tesla maybe, because of the intellectual property. For me it is very good. What is important is to drill and find more of the Invisible Fuel, as The Economist called Energy Efficiency in a special report of Jan 2015. The International Energy Agency (www.IEA.org) stated in its Energy Outlook of 2018 that Energy Efficiency is sluggish and way behind Renewable Energy. My opinion is that the lack of specialised Energy Managers is an important part of the problem with Slow Energy Efficiency. I found no interest for this problem and started the Linked In Group “There are too few Energy Managers” on https://www.linkedin.com/groups/9016375/   I think that an Energy Manager in each large energy consuming organisation would influence important decisions. For example to adopt machinery equipped with the next generation of still more efficient motors!

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