(Re)designing for rare earth free

Rare earth materials and trade barriers

The recent tariffs and protectionist measures have hit magnet supply chains hard. The majority of the world supply is derived from China who have placed export controls on the additives that help get the best magnet strength or make them immune to higher temperatures.

As the restrictions limit supply and drive cost into products, many customers and OEMs are engaging Magnomatics to use their design expertise to reanalyse and move designs away from the high performance materials. This alleviates the import restrictions of heavy rare earths and in some cases allows the UK sourced recycled magnet grades.

Advanced design and analysis

We have established a three point method to lever design to make the changes required.

1) Redesign the magnet geometry to eliminate demagnetisation pinch points

2) Accurately simulate the operating modes to allow us to operate with a reduced margin.

3) Increase the cooling available to the sensitive systems.

Revolutionizing Motor Design Through Full Automation

We've built design tools that completely transform how motors are designed and analysed. We’ve fully scripted the finite element process, meaning we can recreate a complete motor from just a small set of input parameters—things like magnet width, tooth height, and more. With this approach, a new motor variant can be generated in a matter of seconds.

From Weeks to Minutes

Because every aspect of the design is now controlled by code, we can also automate the

entire post-processing and evaluation pipeline. A motor can now be simulated and evaluated from a standing start in under a minute. To put that in perspective: traditional design processes can take engineers over two weeks to manually draw and analyse a single motor. Our system does it in less time than it takes to make a cup of coffee.

A New Way to Understand Performance

By breaking each motor down into a simple, flexible set of variables, we can quickly run sensitivity analyses—tweaking parameters like tooth width or magnet shape—and instantly visualize performance trends.

This gives our engineers a deeper, data-driven understanding of what limits performance and how to overcome those limits through targeted design tweaks.