Last Friday, I had the distinct pleasure of taking in a tour (on behalf of Global Automakers of Canada) of the McMaster Automotive Research Center (MARC), including some of the space they share with Enedym Inc., which is a startup spun out of the University's deep reservoir of intellectual property respecting electric motors and power electronics.
It was fascinating to hear, from Dr.Ali Emadi, the Founder, President and CEO of Enedym and the Professor and Canada Excellence Research Chair in Transportation Electrification and Smart Mobility about the types of the cutting edge research and advanced commercial support work they are doing with respect to these types of products, which are destined for future EVs and personal mobility devices. The world is in need of alternatives to the rare-earth permanent magnet motors that dominate the EV landscape today, in order to democratize global production, reduce associated production costs (a significant contributor to EV costs), and minimize environmental impact. Enedym and the folks at MARC are doing a lot of work on switched reluctance motors (and the complicates software that goes with them) that reportedly offer very comparable power density to rare-earth permanent-magnet motors and which are likely to be critical to the evolution of EVs. It's yet another story of great, groundbreaking work happening in our backyard, and I was admittedly taken aback to have no prior awareness of it.
Two interesting statement that stuck with me from Dr. Emadi's presentation is that he supervises 100+ PhD students that work in this field, that they can offer up to 10x the research value of an Ivy league PhD in the US, and that the research group is one of the most cited, globally, for their work in this area. A quick review of their publications site (https://lnkd.in/grqX_7ep) states that the Centre is publishing a technical report on average every 5 days, and its no wonder, then that the Centre is so prolific in attracting commercial clients to drive their research!
The facilities in the centre are also equally impressive, with full hardware-in-the-loop setup for the battery and power electronics and the electrically-driven dynomometer providing traction for the motors being tested, all of which fed into an advanced driving simulator that incorporates digital twinning of various driving environments and simulated remote sensing.
I was blown away by how singularly impressive everything going on at MARC is, and I am thankful to the folks at Canada's Semiconductor Council for providing the invitation.
#EV #Motors #McMaster #Enedym
