Equivalent Circuit Analysis of an Ultra-Lightweight Motor Designed with Magnetic Resonance Coupling

Electric aircraft may reduce the environmental impact of next-generation transportation technologies. In order to put electric aircraft into practical use, the weight of electric motors must be reduced dramatically. To produce an ultra-lightweight motor, we propose a novel motor that eschews the magnetic cores typically used in induction-motor designs. This article studies a motor design that exploits magnetic resonance coupling to transmit power from coil to coil across an air gap efficiently. This article describes the design concept for such a novel motor and formalizes its equivalent circuit. Then finite-element analysis is used to validate that the equivalent circuit represents the behavior of a realistic magnetic resonance coupling motor. The results indicate that the proposed motor can efficiently achieve high-power density, and the equivalent circuit formalized in this article can be used for further analysis in the design of such a motor.