馬達智財聯盟 Motor Intellectual Property Alliance

作者	Po-Wei Huang, Mi-Ching Tsai and Min-Fu Hsieh
摘要	DUE to the rapid industry development, the demands of electric motors which are capable to be operated under specific environment grow rapidly. Various and multi-demanded conditions such as low vibration, high robustness, flux concentration, light weight or small volume, especially for household appliances, are required for electric motors. However, these demanding requirements are difficult to fulfill by traditional two dimensional (2D) fabrication with steel sheet laminated motor. Therefore, three dimensional (3D) structured motor becomes an attractive solution which enable the design of motor being more flexible in the axial direction. This is not easily achieved by steel sheets. To construct a 3D structure using electrical steel laminations, for example, assembling a motor by welding, riveting or tenoning would reduce the robustness of the motor structure. Also, unacceptable deformation of steel sheets may occur. Bulk materials may be used for motors with 3D magnetic circuits, but the iron losses would be a serious problem. Actually, the material selection and manufacturing process are the keys of 3D motor design. Soft Magnetic Composites (SMCs) are popular in 3D motor design because of low eddy current losses under high frequency operation, especially for the special machine such as claw pole machines, transverse flux machines (TFM) and motors which have 3D flux paths [1][2][3][4]. However, there are still some drawbacks such as the relatively low rupture strength, mould cost and complex parameters tuning [5]. Recently, the additive manufacturing of 3D printing is drawing more and more attention and starting to be widely applied in industry. The excellent capacity of complicated fabrication and robust mechanical structure makes the 3D printing a potential approach to alternate or cooperate with SMC in some motor design and manufacturing. In practice, there has been research focusing on this issue [6]-[8]. In this paper, the possibility, strength and weakness of the additive manufacturing method used in 3D motor fabrication is investigated. Two additive manufacturing methods, fused deposition modeling (FDM) and selective laser melting (SLM), which are applied to manufacture of induction motors (IMs), brushless DC motors (BLDCMs) and even dual gaps motors are studied.
關鍵字	3D printing, additive manufacturing, motor, SLM, FDM.