idw – Informationsdienst Wissenschaft
Nachrichten, Termine, Experten
Nachrichten, Termine, Experten
Innovative materials could help to reduce the energy consumption of electrical devices, allowing drones to fly longer and e-bikes to travel further. By introducing components made from metallic glass into electric motors, researchers aim to minimize energy losses during motor operation. Professor Ralf Busch and his team at Saarland University have developed new alloys for just this purpose. Working together with his colleague Professor Matthias Nienhaus and a group of international partners, the team are exploring fundamental aspects of how 3D printing can be used to manufacture motor components. The EU is supporting their research with €3.5 million.
Electric motors are everywhere – in e-bikes, drones and electric toothbrushes. They convert electricity into motion, but never with perfect efficiency. Energy is always lost in the process and the faster a motor runs, the greater the losses. ‘And the smaller the motors are, the more inefficient they become – a phenomenon known as “iron loss”,’ explains Professor Ralf Busch of Saarland University. One reason for these losses is that the magnetic field inside the motor is constantly changing. In an electric motor, a component known as a rotor turns within a stationary stator, generating an alternating magnetic field whose strength and direction change periodically with time. This continual re-magnetization requires energy. Inside the metal, the tiny magnetic building blocks of the material – which can be thought of as microscopic bar magnets within the crystal structure – have to flip their orientation each time the field reverses direction. Forcing these ‘elementary magnets’ to turn causes internal friction due to the crystalline microstructure of the metal. A portion of the energy is thus converted into heat – and effectively wasted.
‘We are looking into ways of cutting these efficiency losses by improving the materials used in electric motors. In today’s motors, the stator and rotor components are made from conventional soft magnetic, coarse-grained iron alloys. Although these alloys are already optimized, they still exhibit relatively high hysteresis losses during re-magnetization. We want to replace these conventional crystalline alloys with amorphous, glass-like alloys, as they lose hardly any energy during re-magnetization,’ says Ralf Busch, who has been pursuing this approach with an international consortium for four years. ‘The losses decrease dramatically when the crystallites are extremely small, i.e. nanocrystalline in structure, or when the crystal structure is absent altogether, i.e. the material is glass-like or amorphous.’
Metallic glasses mean minimal energy losses
The novel alloys that Busch and his Saarbrücken team have developed within the EU-funded research project help to keep electric drives running cool because magnetization reversal proceeds more smoothly in these materials. ‘This fundamental research has put us in a position where we can help to make the electrical devices of the future more efficient,’ says Busch. ‘Simply by changing the material, we can lower energy consumption in a whole range of everyday electric motors and, ultimately, extend the range of e-scooters or drones. Another positive contribution of our work is that by using amorphous metals we no longer have to deal with critical alloying elements such as cobalt,’ explains Ralf Busch.
The alloys that Busch and his team are working with are metallic glasses with an iron content of 70–80% that can be precisely shaped using 3D printing. Ralf Busch is a pioneer in this field. For decades, Busch has been collaborating with NASA and the German Aerospace Center, and his group have even had some of their novel glass-like metals tested in the microgravity conditions aboard the International Space Station (ISS). The research group holds several patents for novel, ultra-strong alloys with entirely new properties – and has now filed another.
Despite the name, metallic glass is far from brittle; it is a material whose strength is significantly greater than that of steel. The term ‘glass’ refers solely to the material’s inner structure, which is amorphous – meaning it lacks a crystal lattice. ‘In conventional metals, atoms are arranged in ordered crystal lattices. In metallic glasses, the atoms are in a disordered, amorphous arrangement lacking long-range periodicity,’ explains Busch. If researchers choose the mix of atomic species carefully, the atoms will ‘freeze’ in place as the hot melt cools, meaning that the atoms will become locked into position before a crystal lattice can form – much like in a glass. Without a crystal lattice, the process of re-magnetization is easier to achieve in a metallic glass, significantly reducing the iron losses that occur in conventional motor components. ‘Because metallic glasses have no crystallites, the magnetic regions – known as Weiss domains – are not obstructed and can reorient freely when the magnetic field changes,’ says Busch. ‘The magnetic properties of metallic glasses are therefore exceptionally well suited for use in electric motors.’
Metallic glasses can be processed like plastics and moulded into virtually any shape, by injection moulding or, as in this project, by metal 3D printing, which is now being used to produce motor components. The manufacturing process starts by melting the powdered material with a laser and then controlling cooling so that layers with a thickness of 50 micrometres are built up layer by layer into motor parts that are made entirely of amorphous metallic glass with no disruptive crystallites.
Searching for the right alloy in five-dimensional space
Designing alloys with the right set of properties proved to be a highly challenging task. The alloy not only has to vitrify (i.e. form a glass), it also has to have properties that allow it to replace conventional motor materials and it has to be compatible with 3D printing. But Busch’s team eventually found the right recipe. ‘We selected hundreds of alloys and tested their resistance to crystallization. In an alloy containing five elements, that meant searching through a five-dimensional compositional space. If an alloy fails, it’s back to the drawing board for a complete redesign. The breakthrough came just over a year ago,’ says Ralf Busch. The Saarbrücken researchers identified three alloys that resist crystallization and that have the properties needed to successfully print fully glass-like metallic motor components.
The groundwork has therefore been laid for more energy-efficient, environmentally friendly electric motors with drive components made from metallic glass. ‘The challenge now is to develop the process so that it works reliably in practice and at industrial scale,’ adds Professor Matthias Nienhaus, an expert in drive technology at Saarland University. The team is now working to tune the critical parameters in the additive manufacturing process, Laser Powder Bed Fusion (L-PBF), and to devise new processing methods. Busch and Nienhaus are collaborating with partners in Spain, Italy, Poland and Germany within a Europe-wide research and development project.
From 2022 to February 2026, the AM2SoftMag (Additive Manufacturing of Amorphous Metals for Soft Magnetics) project received €3.5 million in funding from the European Innovation Council under the Horizon Europe Pathfinder Open programme. (HORIZON-EIC-2021-PATHFINDEROPEN-01 grant; GA: 101046870))
European consortium
The project team includes Professor Isabella Gallino, who secured the grant at Saarland University in 2022 and has been researching and teaching at TU Berlin since 2024. The consortium’s industrial partner, Heraeus AMLOY Technologies (Karlstein am Main, Germany), is responsible for 3D printing the magnetic components. Other partners are Dr. Teresa Pérez Prado in Madrid (IMDEA Materials Foundation, Spain), a specialist in the 3D printing of metals, Dr. Paola Tiberto in Turin (Istituto Nazionale di Ricerca Metrologica – INRIM, Italy), whose research focuses on measuring the magnetic properties of new materials, and Dr. Tomasz Choma in Warsaw (AMAZEMET, Poland) who is a specialist in metal powder production.
Professor Dr. Ralf Busch, Tel. (Chair of Metallic Materials, Saarland University)
+49 681 302-3208; Email: r.busch@mx.uni-saarland.de
Professor Dr. Matthias Nienhaus (Actuation Technology, Saarland University)
+49 681 302-71681; Email: info@lat.uni-saarland.de
https://www.am2softmag.com - AM2SoftMag (Additive Manufacturing of Amorphous Metals for Soft Magnetics) project
Professor Ralf Busch (left) and his team want to use metallic glasses to make electric motors more e ...
Quelle: UdS
Copyright: Saarland University
Professor Ralf Busch (right) and his team have developed novel alloys whose properties allow them to ...
Quelle: UdS
Copyright: Saarland University
Merkmale dieser Pressemitteilung:
Journalisten, Wirtschaftsvertreter, Wissenschaftler
Elektrotechnik, Maschinenbau, Werkstoffwissenschaften
überregional
Forschungs- / Wissenstransfer, Forschungsergebnisse
Englisch
Sie können Suchbegriffe mit und, oder und / oder nicht verknüpfen, z. B. Philo nicht logie.
Verknüpfungen können Sie mit Klammern voneinander trennen, z. B. (Philo nicht logie) oder (Psycho und logie).
Zusammenhängende Worte werden als Wortgruppe gesucht, wenn Sie sie in Anführungsstriche setzen, z. B. „Bundesrepublik Deutschland“.
Die Erweiterte Suche können Sie auch nutzen, ohne Suchbegriffe einzugeben. Sie orientiert sich dann an den Kriterien, die Sie ausgewählt haben (z. B. nach dem Land oder dem Sachgebiet).
Haben Sie in einer Kategorie kein Kriterium ausgewählt, wird die gesamte Kategorie durchsucht (z.B. alle Sachgebiete oder alle Länder).
