A 2.5 V 600 A MOSFET-Based DC Traction Motor

A high copper fill factor allows reducing the resistive losses responsible for more than 50 % of the losses in today’s most commonly used electrical motors. Single-turn windings achieve a copper fill factor close to one. Furthermore, they do not suffer from turn to turn faults and provide a low thermal resistance between winding and stator. The reduced EMF of single-turn winding configurations promotes the use of extra-low voltage high current MOSFETs. Rapid development of these MOSFETs allows reversing common design principles to explore new applications, such as battery electric traction drives. This paper presents a 2.5 V 1 kW MOSFET driven 13-phase permanent magnet DC motor with a single-turn winding configuration. The motor prototype with a copper fill factor of 0.84 was tested with continuous drive currents up to 600 A. The measured torque-efficiency map shows that such a high-current concept with voltages below 60 V is feasible using today’s extremely low-voltage high current semiconductors. Due to the rapid development of such switches, there is great potential in this concept for further improvements. This work presents a small-scale version of the high-current drive, which is part of the development of an extra-low voltage traction drive concept.