Developing groundbreaking powertrain technologies for renewable energy

Magnomatics’ technologies offer the opportunity for significant efficiency and reliability benefits compared to mechanically geared systems with dramatically smaller and lower cost solutions than conventional direct drive topologies for wind and marine turbine powertrains

The increasing global demand for energy has created a rapidly expanding market for renewable energy. Wind and marine energy systems both require generators that can accept large torque inputs, which generally implies either a mechanical gearbox to reduce the generator torque requirement, or the use of a very large diameter direct-drive machine.

The wind energy industry has experienced high gearbox failure rates from its inception, with the majority of gearboxes yet to achieve a design goal of twenty years.

As utility scale turbines increase in size powertrain size and mass becomes a significant issue and although direct drive generators remove the fault intolerant gearbox, they do this at the expense of a significant size and mass increase in comparison to geared systems and this can significantly affect turbine design and result in increased turbine cost and commissioning expenditure.

Magnomatics PDD® can enable a gearless solution that increases efficiency without any size or weight penalty over a geared topology. Magnomatics magnetic gear and ultra-high torque electrical machine technologies are scalable and are suitable for all sizes of wind or marine turbines from sub 100 kW to many megawatts.