MIT Engineers Present Prototype of Aviation Electric Motor With Power of 1 Megawatt (MW)

MIT Engineers Just Announced A New Electric Motor For Airplanes That Could Change The Aviation Industry. Propulsion Will Make Regional Travel More Ecological.

MIT engineers in the United States recently introduced a new electric motor for airplanes with enough power to electrify the passenger aircraft segment. Until now, only a few small fully electric models equipped with motors capable of hundreds of kilowatts (kW) of power have come out of the drawing board.

New Electric Motor From MIT Engineers Can Be Combined With Jet Engine

The new electric motor for airplanes is expected to reach 1 MW of power; however, it is not yet ready. The team only presented its individual parts and the schematic of how it will look when fully assembled.

The goal is for the motor to be connected to a power source, such as a battery bank or a fuel cell, converting electric energy into mechanical work to spin the propellers of an airplane.

However, the electric motor for airplanes from MIT engineers could also be combined with a traditional turbofan jet engine to function as a hybrid propulsion system, generating electric thrust during certain phases of flight.

According to the project coordinator, Professor Zoltan Spakovszky, it doesn’t matter what will be used as an energy carrier, whether batteries, hydrogen, sustainable aviation fuel, or ammonia, regardless of all this, MW-class motors will be an essential facilitator to make the sector more ecological.

All major companies in the aerospace segment are focusing on the electrification of aircraft propulsion and the design of electric motors on a megawatt scale, which must be lightweight and powerful enough to lift larger passenger aircraft, starting with regional aviation.

MIT Engineers Say It Will Not Be An Easy Task

Despite the availability of electric motors everywhere, the larger the motor itself or the equipment it needs to power, the larger the copper coils and the magnetic rotor must be, as well as the heat generated, which requires a series of components that are not required in, for example, blender motors.

Spakovszky states that there is no silver bullet to make this happen, and the challenge lies in the details. It is heavy engineering in terms of co-optimizing individual components and making them compatible with each other, enhancing the overall performance of the electric motor for airplanes.

To achieve this, MIT engineers must push the limits of materials, manufacturing, thermal management, structures, rotor dynamics, and power electronics.

In the case of an aero engine, weight must be kept to a minimum. By design, the electric motor for airplanes from MIT and the power electronics are approximately the size of a suitcase, weighing less than an adult passenger.

Electric Motor Is Tested And Meets Specifications

According to Spakovszky, the expectation is that this will be the first truly co-optimized integrated design, meaning that the engineers have conducted a very extensive exploration of the design space, where all considerations, from thermal management to rotor dynamics, electric motor architecture, and power electronics have been evaluated in an integrated manner to discover what is the best possible combination to achieve the specific power needed for one megawatt. 

The MIT engineers have already tested all the components individually and met the project specifications.

The next step will be to conduct heavy engineering, bringing all the pieces together to work in unison. The main components of the motor are a high-speed rotor, a compact low-loss stator, a heat exchanger, and a distributed power electronics system.