Technological leap in cooling leads to most durable electric motor

Global automotive supplier Mahle has announced it has made a technological leap in cooling, which led to the creation of what it claims is the most durable electric motor on the market.

Mahle says that the new SCT e-motor is unique on the market and can run indefinitely with high performance. It also claims it is "surpassingly clean, light, and efficient", can be assembled without the use of rare earth minerals if by customer request, and is suitable for passenger cars and commercial vehicles as well as construction machines and tractors.

The SCT e-motor is due to be presented for the first time at IAA Transportation in September 2022 in Hanover, Germany.

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“Building large electric motors that deliver short-term high performance is easy. What was still lacking on the market until now were durable yet compact drives to make electric vehicles unrestricted for everyday use,” said Martin Berger, Director of Corporate Research and Advanced Engineering at Mahle “Our new SCT E-motor is the solution.”

On the drivetrain side, this clears the way for the replacement of the combustion engine in all vehicle classes. In 2021, Mahle presented a wear-free and scalable traction motor for passenger cars that runs very efficiently over a wide rpm range.

The SCT E-motor, on the other hand, is designed in such a way that it is particularly efficient within a certain rpm range. Despite its very compact and light design, its continuous output is more than 90% of its peak output.

This high ratio constitutes a technological leap and allows the use of electric vehicles of all kinds even under demanding conditions., such as driving an electric truck over mountain passes or the multiple sprints of a battery-electric passenger car. These scenarios are only insufficiently covered by the electric motors available on the market up to now, Mahle said.

This resilience is achieved by the new Mahle electric motor through the use of integrated oil cooling, which makes it more robust and allows waste heat to be used in the vehicle’s complete system. The extremely compact design results in cheaper material costs and a more lightweight motor, which requires less material during manufacture and increases the possible net load in commercial vehicles.

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In designing the product, the company went for a "permanently excited motor", which enables a very compact design and means no energy has to be transferred to the rotor as “excitation current”, making the motor more efficient and wear-free.

Neodymium magnets, currently the strongest permanent magnets that can be produced, are used to generate the magnetic field in the motor. However, to achieve greater independence from raw material prices and geopolitical developments causing supply chain issues, the SCT E-motor can also be designed without magnets for greater independence. The magnet-free variant would also be wear-free and run efficiently, while only requiring slightly more assembly space.

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