Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s National (ORNL) Transportation Research Center have developed a novel electric motor drive design that meets the performance demands of aircraft, marine vessels and heavy-duty trucks while reducing excess heat and premature wear.
The approach reduces overheating, electrical noise and component wear by cutting neutral-point current, which creates excess heat inside motor drives, and common-mode voltage, which is stray voltage that causes electrical interference and equipment damage. The result is lower overall electrical stress in demanding transportation environments.
Simulations show a 90 percent reduction in neutral-point voltage fluctuations and a 43 percent drop in current stress on capacitors, helping systems operate more reliably where durability and uptime are critical.
“This design change requires no additional hardware,” ORNL researcher Gui-Jia Su said. “As systems move toward higher power levels, we need solutions that are scalable and reliable.”
ORNL’s approach uses two inversely synchronized inverters to cancel unwanted effects at the system level while retaining the original hardware, offering higher-performance propulsion without added complexity or cost.