These projects take a lot of time and effort. So if you'd like to support my work, you can join the channel or use the Super Thanks button on the videos. Your support will help me create content faster and with better quality, and as a member, you’ll get some exclusive perks too!
This is where boundaries are pushed. Micro electronics, 3d printers and other now accessible tools make it possible for geniuses to be geniuses. Well done.
@@jamesmelemede5610 hey, while it might be useless it's more of an experiment not a product to be sold. I like TH-cam how it is because TH-camrs can make things that are not optimized for profit yet still get money it incentivizes interesting content and doesn't constrict you in doing things only for profit. Like man gearboxes are great and all but where else you would see one made of magnets - TH-cam.
@@jamesmelemede5610 You do realise this is just a prototype right? Plus it has many advantages over a mechanical gearbox: No risk of grinding gears and potentially no need for a clutch for one. Instead of mechanical sheer forces we have to deal with overheating, which is a much easier issue to solve.
@@jamesmelemede5610 Bro, if youtuber without huge expirience knowlage, expencive tools and lab of engineers can produce this gearbox, then maybe, just maybe in perfect conditions it has a lot of potential. Or simply one specific fucking task? Can't your GRAND and intelligent brfain comprehand that????
@@jamesmelemede5610That was an unwarranted insult... This is a prototype, and it using as little of rare earth magnets isnt its purpose. A person just wanted to make a magnetic gearbox. Also isnt it quite usual for gearboxes to be bigger than the motors, especially if they need to do a massive reduction or is made out of weak materials like plastic? (Or is a prototype?)
@@karyjas1 I get ya, but that's why we can't have nice things. Be it intellectual laziness or R&D costs being so artificially high thanks to market capture, patent law, or just simple low wages very, very few people can manage to put together a prototype, the result is stagnation and learned helplessness. And it's even worse when people assume tossing around napkin math and a 9th grade grasp of physics makes them Grand Poobah on Turd Mountain. Currently dealing with the type elsewhere related to rotary valve engines.
@@custos3249Heh i watched that video myself. Hey dont worry about thinigs outside of your control, dont stress yourself. Only do when you decide to do something about it. The situation isnt great, but more negativity is likely going to make things worse. So - may you have a good day and lets hope things will improve in the future while we do our best
the slip torque of this gearbox is actually crazy. the idea to use a planetary style and everything else that went into designing this motor is pure genius. with the ability to transfer such a high torque it shows that magnetic gearboxes have far better potential than i think many people realize.
@@matthewfredrickmfkrz1934 With the exception of the bearings, there are no wear parts. Plus, an over-torque situation results in slipping instead of stripping a gear. This could seriously reduce wear and maintenance in some applications.
It is dramatically more expensive to regularly replace bearings, disassemble and relube gears, or have massive failures when gears are over torqued and strip or at worst shatter and break other parts.@@matthewfredrickmfkrz1934
This video/project was *professional* , the testing and full on *production engineering* to an extent is really refreshing when some may not go to those same lengths. Really well done!
Gearbox with magnets I have been thinking about for years but I don't have enought experience about it. Well done! You did it. I watched your video over and over again to understand what you have done and amazed with your engineering and effort. As a mechanical engineer I congratulate you from the bottom of my heart.
I used to always point out the reasons why something will not work for real applications, but I changed the way I look at ideas now. Who knows where it will be applied in what form (full, partial or modified). Amount of preproduction work that is study, modeling, printing or machining, presentation readiness and all the unseen trial runs etc and then the whole storyboarding, production and post production work, shows his level passion on the subject. I want to see the behind the scenes now right from study, research to post production of the video....
Idea. You currently have a fixed gearbox, but what if you were able to adjust the number of poles on the fly? Say by having an inner cage and then moving it between different housings, or play around with some electromagnets. You could have not just a gearbox, but a clutch-less transmission!
Interesting idea. There's a way to 'turn off' or cancel out the magnetic field of permanent magnets, that actionlab demonstrates in one of his shorts. You might be able to use that in combination with the split torque release to change the power in the gearbox. Or like you said, by using electromagnets and varying their charge. It might even be possible just by taking advantage of its slip torque and using multiple gears, so that a stronger one engages when the weaker one reaches its maximum slip torque and so on, as a sort of automatic transmission.
An attempt to productize a magnetic clutch/transfer was made by MagnaDrive back in about 2000. All of this looks familiar and they had some very good systems for misaligned shafts, vibration reduction, gearing, etc. Great looking aluminum housings and led by a former Boeing CEO. But heat dissipation, reliability, and lack of performance along with decreasing capability over time led to its demise. How do I know this? I was an investor and lost a lot of money in what appeared to be a promising technology. So, as much as I like to see someone showing the journey, I know pretty much where this effort ends. The heating is due less to friction than it is to eddy currents caused by the rotating magnetic fields. Keep experimenting, but it might be useful to see what the state of the art is before engaging.
Excellent comment, but one company failing to productise can be a death-knell for a technology, at least for future private investment, simply because it will be forever assumed to be due to techical failure. There are a lot of reasons such start ups fail, and the failure alone isn't enough to prove that there was really a show stopper. Openly published research and development like this is pretty much the only way such technologies get a real chance. The other way is government funded public research, mostly aimed at determining whether it's *worth* further pursueing. This video is totally perfect in an of itself: A good attempt was made, and there was fairly significant success. This comment further raises important issues, to which I will add: Is the failure over time due to 'wearing out' the magnets? Magnets store energy, and it's usually difficult to 'drain' them when every interaction tends to go both ways. But it's not impossible, particularly if magnetic saturation and cyclic heating/movement is involved. When this is the case, it would account for gradually decreasing capability over time, but it might also be possible to engineer around that failure mode (ie, make it not a 'show stopper') so long as it is understood. Failing to understand the long-term failure mode 'in time' to work around it can certainly seem like, and even BE a show-stopper, especially for a startup. Funding runs out before the payback, and the idea dies 'on the vine'. But it might not be truely a dead-end, just a last-minute pitfall the MagnaDrive engineers just didn't see in time to avoid. Given the pressure to push the performance to its limits to either maximise return on investment, or at least ease marketing, it is fairly likely that this kind of longevity failure would result. Worse, those involved in the unsuccessful first effort, especially those 'stung' by other investment pulling out, would be likely to give great air-time to the apparent unworthiness of the technology. This is not wrong: It's important to share knowledge of hazards widely. It does suggest a good target for further research might be to actually try to reproduce the decline in performance over time, and then see if the mechanism of it can be confirmed. From this video alone, it seems safe to say the magnets themselves can easily be monitored to avoid overheating them, so that issue might not be what really caused the decrease in performance over time. So here's an alternative hypothetical mechanism: The classic way to 'drain' a permanent magnet is to exploit the Curie point: Allow magnet to do work pulling an anchor (discharge energy), then use Curie point to demagnetise the anchor, reducing the force requirements to remove the anchor, without doing work against the magnetic field (which minimises the recharging that otherwise occurs), then cool the anchor, and repeat the cycle. This results in an 'engine' that runs, at least until the magnet drains. Similar trick can be pulled by energizing an additional coil to increase the magnetic field to the point the anchor becomes saturated, whereupon the permanent magnet 'loses traction' with it. This gearbox isn't trying to be an 'engine' like this, but a similar effect could occur if anything exposed to the changing magnetic fields can behave even partially in a similar way (not necessarily Curie point, but also core saturation). A way to measure this might be a high-range magnetic flux sensor mounted in front of one of the stator array magnets. If that shows a slow downward trend, you've caught it in the act of wearing out. But it might not be the stator magnets that wear out - could also be the inner array ones. The easy way is to just keep conducting repeated efficiency and maximum slip experiments between extended power transfer runs. The way I would do that is use two brushless DC motors, and two AC variable speed drive invertors, with at least one able to regen, and both running from the same DC bus. Therefore the power goes from one to the other and back to the bus, only less losses, which saves on having to completely supply/dump the energy as with a brake. That way the power flow through the gearbox under test can be much higher than the AC outlet draw, so it can be run for a lot longer with less dissipation. Would use motors with different pole configurations to help account for the gearbox ratio difference. I'd expect it potentially possible to arrange these gearboxes so they might actually tend to 'charge' the magnets: Thus preventing the fate of getting worse over time. They'd get better, up to the point of saturating the magnets, probably at the cost of reduced efficiency. TANSTAAFL after all. The other thing that may happen, is that effects on the state of the magnets may depend on details about the load - perhaps cycling in a certain way exacerbates magnet drain, and operating differently might avoid it? Won't know without a better understanding of that mechanism. Either way, the true reward of excellent research work is... more research work!
Where could we get more information on this? What were the end applications that were put to you for you to invest. And was there any discussion on how to dissipate the heat OR put the heat to use? Thank you
Dude you are such a monster, not many viewers will understand the work, effort and knowledge that you've put in the video. Keep going like this buddy it's insane !
Ingenious design, with a lot of great improvements. You can have even more torque if the magnets in the center were mounted on a much stronger and stiffer material. The reason for this is that as you approach higher levels of torque, the material holding the magnets is starting to bend, so you lose tolerance. If you can tighten tolerances, and use stiffer materials then that will greatly improve torque. You might be able to find a ferrite bar and shape what you need instead of cutting little tiny pieces of aluminum? (worth thinking about to save labor) Great Inventiveness.
You know, if a gear shreds itself, you must then turn a new one, wasting the old gear. Now, if the magnets die, either because of temperature, or just wear out their power over time, they can be sled out of the housing, and get remagnetized in bulk, just by putting them through a powerful electromagnet, they have those on sale. The bonus is that after remagnetizing, magnets tend to have a stronger magnetic pull than magnets from the shelves.
That is wild! To make creating all of those tiny plates *MUCH* easier, I would 1. Spray insulating epoxy (or w/e) on both sides of a metal plate. 2. Clamp the plate to a CNC mill on a sacrificial sheet of MDF. 3. Drill some of the holes for mounting, then screw the plate down firmly. 4. Drill the rest of the holes. 5. Cut the pieces out, leaving tabs at each crossing point so the pieces stay in place. 6. Break the plate apart, stack the pieces on a bolt & nut--to hold them firmly aligned--and sand the edges smooth 7. *_PROFIT!!!_* Cheers!
The problem was not the plastic case, but the small steel pieces that I had attached to the carbon fiber rods. Because I glued them with epoxy, when the sharp lathe tool hit them, it would probably force them out of place instead of sanding.
Nice work! In my bachelor thesis I constructed and build a magnetic gearbox around the same size as yours. I managed to get 60 Nm of torque out of it. One important thing is to get the magnets as close as possible to modulator. If you want i can send it to you, its in german, but google translator can help you :D
Cannot wait for your next video!! This is so informative as I am also fascinated with these topics but don’t have the access to the equipment that you do, or the dollars to currently put toward the materials from pcb way quite yet. So, I am always so interested and excited to watch you explore these topics I’m super fascinated with! And you have been following the ideas here as I would plus you always add some ingenious details I would not think of, well at least certainly not nearly as quickly as you do; so I eagerly await your videos in this series the most so far to live vicariously through your workshop and materials and watching you problem solve and create! Thanks for what you do!
This is a brilliant experiment and concept. In the first design with the screws, maybe you could stack M3 thin washers to create a cheap laminate effect. Well done and keep up the good work. It would be interesting to see if this design could spin larger propellers on drones. :)
I think TH-cam needs a super like button next to the like button. I really appreciate the explanations behind all the choices and changes. And seeing (through the graph) the result of all the work going into such a smooth operation to prevent cogging torque, that was fascinating.
Another amazing video, good work! I am seriously impressed with your progress and at this rate I feel like magnetic gearboxes might be everywhere some day
Well done, and thanks for the efficiency testing. Seems like most magnetic gearbox's aren't very good but yours is great! You certainly put in a lot of work.
This is actually fantastic progress! Consider that you may hit an optimized point, where the magnet arrangement just can't be altered further and your torque break point just can't be improved at this ratio further. This is normal for conventional gears too, where the size of the gear ceases to be optimized for further acceleration (which obviously you know) and hence the need for transmission boxes that change up the ratios. Just to say, you might want to start determining the best way to transfer to a new larger gear before reaching the optimized slipping point. If you can get it to do so automatically, that would be the ideal! If anyone can, it's you!
Love your work. Very impressive! I have a new project Idea as a follow up: Replace the inner rotor with the stator from an Outrunner brushless DC motor. A rotating magnetic field from the stator should be equivalent to your inner rotor. Essentially you would have a internally geared Brushless DC motor!
@@retsetman9698 Also, heat, you would have an unventilated heater inside. which would mess with the modulation amount and the magnet life span. it would be better is the exterior part was stationary, as it would be easier to cool (big surface area, lots of copper to allow easier dissipation), but electromagnet halbachs are weird tho.
@@giuseppebonatici7169i had similar thoughts of an exterior electromagnetic coil set around the outside that could be modulated in such a way as to create a potential locking effect to increase output torque with little &/or variable energy input.
This is amazing! I wish I could get one of these with a 5:1 ratio for my tractor. Then I could use modern 540rpm CCW impliments from the 3250rpm CW power take-off shaft of my 1980s machine.
I'm only part way through the video, so maybe you tested this, but I'm curious about the actual efficiency. Well made gears are quite efficient, and I wonder if induction and eddie currents will work against you just as badly as friction in a traditional gear system would. This is super cool though! It works so much better than I expected. Edit: oh, nice! You tested the efficiency! I can't wait to see what you do next.
Looks promising. Try 40% glass filled PEEK (Poly Ether Ether Ketone) instead of PLA because it deals with heat better (You may have to upgrade your 3D printer though) and Mu-Metal shielded magnetic bearings?
This could have interesting use cases where obstruction of the mechanism by limbs is a risk factor. Like in places where people are working close to open gears or something, this could possibly used as a safty gear, that would have just enough holding force to move the shaft it needed to move, but any more resistance, like an arm or leg getting in the way, would be enough to push it past the magnets and stopping amputation. Really cool.
I highly suggest changing your bearings to nitride boron ball bearings. Not only will they not heat up as much, the ceramic bearings wont deform due to heat cycling or extended high rpm runs like metal bearings. They also chew up any junk that gets in the bearing unlike metallic bearings. But best of all? Less rolling resistance for higher system efficiency and less parasitic loss.
I was just learning about another way to get the benefits of laminated steel without the issues of laminating steel; at least kind of. Either way, think a bunch of iron filings or iron from the ground, picked up with a magnet, set into a binder and poured into the shape of choice. Edit: I just tested a small mix of ground iron and clear gorilla glue which upon testing with a digital multimeter showed no conductivity. The properties seem quite similar to laminated cores. I do however have reservations of the particular glue I'm using to cure in large batches. Perhaps epoxy would be a better binder; yet I have not tested that.
That's a pretty good idea, but i would include a diamagnetic filler in addition to the metal. You want it to form flux tubes and you want to trap the flux in those tubes. Otherwise you'll have the flux tubes rearrange as the surface fields change.
Thanks for building this - I'm trying to make some mag brakes for my bike so I can do some regen but also to save my brakes on really long gradual descents. I keep burning them up...if I only use them for low speeds/holding then they'll last a lot longer and work a lot better when I use them.
that's a huge use case, i was thinking about concentric arrangement and cyclic connections, so n, n+3 etc can fire up on level n, m,m+4 can fire up on level m and cycle through to reduce heat. i was also thinking about using flywheels
Uhm. You need to properly measure output power. 80 percent is shockingly good, but a properly scaled single ratio gearbox has low single digit losses. Nice work though, and magnets are obviously a cool source of unique properties.
Actually not exactly correct, that value of 3.4 Watts is achieved by zeroed the scale, PSU gives 160 ish watts, the motor efficiency is about 35% so the power in the input shaft actually should have be around 60 watts, and with the 85%ish gearbox efficiency so now the loss is about 10 Watts, hope I’m clear
This vid got recommended to me out of the blue. I enjoyed it. However I'm not 100% sure about it's application as this is the first vid I've seen. I am a aerospace machinist shop monkey (I make the gears that go into any jet turbine engine. Military or commercial.) so if you ever need any help with that side of things I'll be happy to help. The clicking at the end is likely due to either the amount of runout which gets exaggerated with higher RPMS or (Most likely) the thingy a doo is poorly balanced which is causing runout. And seeing how you somewhat crudely cut those aluminum spacer things I'll be willing to guess that's the main issue. Anyways I love watching these kinds of vids.
@@violinviolator5841I will note that there are other ways of doing something similar. Many lathes have a system where the lowest gear ratio is coupled by ball bearings pressed by springs into divots on another gear. That way, when I do something stupid, it overcomes the spring pressure and slips instead of breaking the lathe.
@@arthurmoore9488 That's cool. I wonder what applications there are where this is specifically better suited than a mechanical design such as your lathe employs.
@@gormauslanderProbably anywhere that slip torque is expected regularly. I've seen the design for my lathe have trouble re-engaging, but it's fine since it's more like a circuit breaker than something I ever want to use. Direct drive, or near direct drive, hydraulics and electric motors could also probably slip without damage, but anything with a gearbox this has potential as compared to clutch pads.
Great content! Very detailed and summarized, the quality of your instruments sup superb. Any chance this Mag gearbox will run in conjunction with a over unity device or magnet motor!?
To say there is no wear is to fail to understand magnets. There is going to be wear. It's just not going to manifest as visible wear. It's going to manifest as an increasing random scattering of magnetic domains over time. Essentially the magnets will stop being magnets as the wear increases. The harder the system is pushed and the more heat it generates, the faster this will happen.
Someone could make a more efficient and slightly larger version of this and easily get 50nm of torque output. This could have so many applications in industry! Especially if over torqued it wont break a tooth on a gear assembly.
The only real world application for this I know of is in space. Where moving parts must work perfectly for decades, but don't necessarily need to be powerful.
having reliable gears never fail is useful for all of future society imagine building a machine and it just werks with no maintenance, this is a huge step in that.
You could spend all those magnets on a servo itself. You could just run the "final drive" electronically directly.. Likewiise you can replace all the middle parts with wires,
For a given weight (= cost/volume/size) of permanent magnets, an Hallbach array gives much LESS magnetic field than a traditional array + back iron. Commercial brushless motors always use back iron to close the magnetic circuit and never Hallback arrays.
Love it! Great follow up video! Nice work! What is the outer diameter of the whole assembly? From an engineering standpoint, it would be great to see what the maximum torque that could be transmitted, with the restriction of making the gearbox diameter the same as the motor (like a traditional DC motor sold on amazon with a spur gear based gearbox).
Do you think a minimized or megamized(?) system could be used to increase efficiency of a hand crank generator? This would be fascinating from a survival energy perspective.
Awesome stuff! Have you ever looked into 3phase torque conversion? That is, 3 phase motor such as any brushless hobby motor used as an alternator to transfer energy to another motor to have non-linear torque transfer.
You could put such a modulator between the stator and rotor of a conventional BLDC. How extreme of a gear ratio is it possible to achieve? It would be nice if PCBWay or JLC or whoever did silicon steel lamination fabrication.
These projects take a lot of time and effort. So if you'd like to support my work, you can join the channel or use the Super Thanks button on the videos. Your support will help me create content faster and with better quality, and as a member, you’ll get some exclusive perks too!
This is where boundaries are pushed. Micro electronics, 3d printers and other now accessible tools make it possible for geniuses to be geniuses. Well done.
@@jamesmelemede5610 hey, while it might be useless it's more of an experiment not a product to be sold. I like TH-cam how it is because TH-camrs can make things that are not optimized for profit yet still get money it incentivizes interesting content and doesn't constrict you in doing things only for profit. Like man gearboxes are great and all but where else you would see one made of magnets - TH-cam.
@@jamesmelemede5610 You do realise this is just a prototype right?
Plus it has many advantages over a mechanical gearbox: No risk of grinding gears and potentially no need for a clutch for one. Instead of mechanical sheer forces we have to deal with overheating, which is a much easier issue to solve.
@@jamesmelemede5610 Bro, if youtuber without huge expirience knowlage, expencive tools and lab of engineers can produce this gearbox, then maybe, just maybe in perfect conditions it has a lot of potential. Or simply one specific fucking task? Can't your GRAND and intelligent brfain comprehand that????
@jamesmelemede5610 all bro sees is black
Your big brain couldn't come up with a situation where this might be useful, leave it at that.@@jamesmelemede5610
Wish there were more of this type of content on youtube. Love progress/upgrades on engineering projects
Same. Really disappointing how dismissive and unimaginative engineers and especially "engineers" can be.
@@jamesmelemede5610That was an unwarranted insult... This is a prototype, and it using as little of rare earth magnets isnt its purpose. A person just wanted to make a magnetic gearbox. Also isnt it quite usual for gearboxes to be bigger than the motors, especially if they need to do a massive reduction or is made out of weak materials like plastic? (Or is a prototype?)
@@custos3249Its just difficult to pull this off. It can be exhausting and costly in many ways. So gotta appreciate and celebrate those who do it
@@karyjas1 I get ya, but that's why we can't have nice things. Be it intellectual laziness or R&D costs being so artificially high thanks to market capture, patent law, or just simple low wages very, very few people can manage to put together a prototype, the result is stagnation and learned helplessness. And it's even worse when people assume tossing around napkin math and a 9th grade grasp of physics makes them Grand Poobah on Turd Mountain. Currently dealing with the type elsewhere related to rotary valve engines.
@@custos3249Heh i watched that video myself. Hey dont worry about thinigs outside of your control, dont stress yourself. Only do when you decide to do something about it. The situation isnt great, but more negativity is likely going to make things worse. So - may you have a good day and lets hope things will improve in the future while we do our best
the slip torque of this gearbox is actually crazy. the idea to use a planetary style and everything else that went into designing this motor is pure genius. with the ability to transfer such a high torque it shows that magnetic gearboxes have far better potential than i think many people realize.
Looks expensive
@@matthewfredrickmfkrz1934for now. economies of scale are possible if there is a strong enough need.
@@matthewfredrickmfkrz1934 With the exception of the bearings, there are no wear parts. Plus, an over-torque situation results in slipping instead of stripping a gear. This could seriously reduce wear and maintenance in some applications.
@@arthurmoore9488 85% efficiency for simple gearbox is a verdict.
It is dramatically more expensive to regularly replace bearings, disassemble and relube gears, or have massive failures when gears are over torqued and strip or at worst shatter and break other parts.@@matthewfredrickmfkrz1934
This video/project was *professional* , the testing and full on *production engineering* to an extent is really refreshing when some may not go to those same lengths.
Really well done!
Gearbox with magnets I have been thinking about for years but I don't have enought experience about it.
Well done! You did it.
I watched your video over and over again to understand what you have done and amazed with your engineering and effort.
As a mechanical engineer I congratulate you from the bottom of my heart.
I used to always point out the reasons why something will not work for real applications, but I changed the way I look at ideas now. Who knows where it will be applied in what form (full, partial or modified). Amount of preproduction work that is study, modeling, printing or machining, presentation readiness and all the unseen trial runs etc and then the whole storyboarding, production and post production work, shows his level passion on the subject. I want to see the behind the scenes now right from study, research to post production of the video....
No, we definitely need more of the "why it won't work" too many people soyface at stuff uncritically
Idea. You currently have a fixed gearbox, but what if you were able to adjust the number of poles on the fly? Say by having an inner cage and then moving it between different housings, or play around with some electromagnets. You could have not just a gearbox, but a clutch-less transmission!
Good idea, will try it myself
Interesting idea. There's a way to 'turn off' or cancel out the magnetic field of permanent magnets, that actionlab demonstrates in one of his shorts. You might be able to use that in combination with the split torque release to change the power in the gearbox. Or like you said, by using electromagnets and varying their charge. It might even be possible just by taking advantage of its slip torque and using multiple gears, so that a stronger one engages when the weaker one reaches its maximum slip torque and so on, as a sort of automatic transmission.
An attempt to productize a magnetic clutch/transfer was made by MagnaDrive back in about 2000. All of this looks familiar and they had some very good systems for misaligned shafts, vibration reduction, gearing, etc. Great looking aluminum housings and led by a former Boeing CEO. But heat dissipation, reliability, and lack of performance along with decreasing capability over time led to its demise. How do I know this? I was an investor and lost a lot of money in what appeared to be a promising technology. So, as much as I like to see someone showing the journey, I know pretty much where this effort ends.
The heating is due less to friction than it is to eddy currents caused by the rotating magnetic fields. Keep experimenting, but it might be useful to see what the state of the art is before engaging.
Excellent comment, but one company failing to productise can be a death-knell for a technology, at least for future private investment, simply because it will be forever assumed to be due to techical failure.
There are a lot of reasons such start ups fail, and the failure alone isn't enough to prove that there was really a show stopper.
Openly published research and development like this is pretty much the only way such technologies get a real chance.
The other way is government funded public research, mostly aimed at determining whether it's *worth* further pursueing. This video is totally perfect in an of itself: A good attempt was made, and there was fairly significant success. This comment further raises important issues, to which I will add: Is the failure over time due to 'wearing out' the magnets?
Magnets store energy, and it's usually difficult to 'drain' them when every interaction tends to go both ways. But it's not impossible, particularly if magnetic saturation and cyclic heating/movement is involved. When this is the case, it would account for gradually decreasing capability over time, but it might also be possible to engineer around that failure mode (ie, make it not a 'show stopper') so long as it is understood.
Failing to understand the long-term failure mode 'in time' to work around it can certainly seem like, and even BE a show-stopper, especially for a startup. Funding runs out before the payback, and the idea dies 'on the vine'. But it might not be truely a dead-end, just a last-minute pitfall the MagnaDrive engineers just didn't see in time to avoid. Given the pressure to push the performance to its limits to either maximise return on investment, or at least ease marketing, it is fairly likely that this kind of longevity failure would result.
Worse, those involved in the unsuccessful first effort, especially those 'stung' by other investment pulling out, would be likely to give great air-time to the apparent unworthiness of the technology. This is not wrong: It's important to share knowledge of hazards widely. It does suggest a good target for further research might be to actually try to reproduce the decline in performance over time, and then see if the mechanism of it can be confirmed.
From this video alone, it seems safe to say the magnets themselves can easily be monitored to avoid overheating them, so that issue might not be what really caused the decrease in performance over time.
So here's an alternative hypothetical mechanism:
The classic way to 'drain' a permanent magnet is to exploit the Curie point: Allow magnet to do work pulling an anchor (discharge energy), then use Curie point to demagnetise the anchor, reducing the force requirements to remove the anchor, without doing work against the magnetic field (which minimises the recharging that otherwise occurs), then cool the anchor, and repeat the cycle. This results in an 'engine' that runs, at least until the magnet drains. Similar trick can be pulled by energizing an additional coil to increase the magnetic field to the point the anchor becomes saturated, whereupon the permanent magnet 'loses traction' with it.
This gearbox isn't trying to be an 'engine' like this, but a similar effect could occur if anything exposed to the changing magnetic fields can behave even partially in a similar way (not necessarily Curie point, but also core saturation).
A way to measure this might be a high-range magnetic flux sensor mounted in front of one of the stator array magnets. If that shows a slow downward trend, you've caught it in the act of wearing out. But it might not be the stator magnets that wear out - could also be the inner array ones.
The easy way is to just keep conducting repeated efficiency and maximum slip experiments between extended power transfer runs.
The way I would do that is use two brushless DC motors, and two AC variable speed drive invertors, with at least one able to regen, and both running from the same DC bus. Therefore the power goes from one to the other and back to the bus, only less losses, which saves on having to completely supply/dump the energy as with a brake.
That way the power flow through the gearbox under test can be much higher than the AC outlet draw, so it can be run for a lot longer with less dissipation. Would use motors with different pole configurations to help account for the gearbox ratio difference.
I'd expect it potentially possible to arrange these gearboxes so they might actually tend to 'charge' the magnets: Thus preventing the fate of getting worse over time.
They'd get better, up to the point of saturating the magnets, probably at the cost of reduced efficiency. TANSTAAFL after all.
The other thing that may happen, is that effects on the state of the magnets may depend on details about the load - perhaps cycling in a certain way exacerbates magnet drain, and operating differently might avoid it?
Won't know without a better understanding of that mechanism.
Either way, the true reward of excellent research work is... more research work!
Where could we get more information on this? What were the end applications that were put to you for you to invest. And was there any discussion on how to dissipate the heat OR put the heat to use? Thank you
Dude you are such a monster, not many viewers will understand the work, effort and knowledge that you've put in the video. Keep going like this buddy it's insane !
Ingenious design, with a lot of great improvements. You can have even more torque if the magnets in the center were mounted on a much stronger and stiffer material. The reason for this is that as you approach higher levels of torque, the material holding the magnets is starting to bend, so you lose tolerance. If you can tighten tolerances, and use stiffer materials then that will greatly improve torque.
You might be able to find a ferrite bar and shape what you need instead of cutting little tiny pieces of aluminum? (worth thinking about to save labor)
Great Inventiveness.
You know, if a gear shreds itself, you must then turn a new one, wasting the old gear. Now, if the magnets die, either because of temperature, or just wear out their power over time, they can be sled out of the housing, and get remagnetized in bulk, just by putting them through a powerful electromagnet, they have those on sale. The bonus is that after remagnetizing, magnets tend to have a stronger magnetic pull than magnets from the shelves.
That is wild! To make creating all of those tiny plates *MUCH* easier, I would
1. Spray insulating epoxy (or w/e) on both sides of a metal plate.
2. Clamp the plate to a CNC mill on a sacrificial sheet of MDF.
3. Drill some of the holes for mounting, then screw the plate down firmly.
4. Drill the rest of the holes.
5. Cut the pieces out, leaving tabs at each crossing point so the pieces stay in place.
6. Break the plate apart, stack the pieces on a bolt & nut--to hold them firmly aligned--and sand the edges smooth
7. *_PROFIT!!!_*
Cheers!
11:02 I can't believe you mounted it to the lathe and then chose to dremel it rather than just turn it on the lathe xD
because the case is made from plastic
and it will be destroyed if use lathe
but dremel did not make so much force to case.
@@Protodyakon I've done plenty of work with plastic on the lathe. You just have to be careful.
The problem was not the plastic case, but the small steel pieces that I had attached to the carbon fiber rods. Because I glued them with epoxy, when the sharp lathe tool hit them, it would probably force them out of place instead of sanding.
some of the best projects period. really well done man. impressive! keep pushing limits
Nice work!
In my bachelor thesis I constructed and build a magnetic gearbox around the same size as yours.
I managed to get 60 Nm of torque out of it.
One important thing is to get the magnets as close as possible to modulator.
If you want i can send it to you, its in german, but google translator can help you :D
I would love to see! Would you send it here: semidiych@gmail.com
That sounds pretty awesome.
How does your magnetic gearbox compare with what's generally available with more traditional gearboxes?
@@retsetman9698 i send you the thesis:)
@@MM-24 They require less maintainance and the cant break due to overload, because the just slip if overloaded
Spectacular work. Thank you for documenting this so well: what a great resource.
Cannot wait for your next video!! This is so informative as I am also fascinated with these topics but don’t have the access to the equipment that you do, or the dollars to currently put toward the materials from pcb way quite yet. So, I am always so interested and excited to watch you explore these topics I’m super fascinated with! And you have been following the ideas here as I would plus you always add some ingenious details I would not think of, well at least certainly not nearly as quickly as you do; so I eagerly await your videos in this series the most so far to live vicariously through your workshop and materials and watching you problem solve and create! Thanks for what you do!
dude I was geniuenly sad when the video ended. Keep it going :)
Thank you for putting in so much effort and sharing your findings with the world!
This is very interesting and original. I like your process. Very methodical and precise. I subscribed, and this is the first video I watched.
This is a brilliant experiment and concept. In the first design with the screws, maybe you could stack M3 thin washers to create a cheap laminate effect. Well done and keep up the good work. It would be interesting to see if this design could spin larger propellers on drones. :)
Amazing video! Very inspirational, the level of detail provided, formatting, truly awesome.
I think TH-cam needs a super like button next to the like button. I really appreciate the explanations behind all the choices and changes. And seeing (through the graph) the result of all the work going into such a smooth operation to prevent cogging torque, that was fascinating.
7:01 This would be a good application for the Electrochemical Etching thing “Applied Science” design for “Photochemical Machining” !
Another amazing video, good work! I am seriously impressed with your progress and at this rate I feel like magnetic gearboxes might be everywhere some day
Thats really fascinating. And your metal work is great. Together with PCB way you could build a final version Out of Metal or Carbon.
Well done, and thanks for the efficiency testing. Seems like most magnetic gearbox's aren't very good but yours is great! You certainly put in a lot of work.
Just amazing... how you evolved it is just mind boggling.
This is actually fantastic progress! Consider that you may hit an optimized point, where the magnet arrangement just can't be altered further and your torque break point just can't be improved at this ratio further. This is normal for conventional gears too, where the size of the gear ceases to be optimized for further acceleration (which obviously you know) and hence the need for transmission boxes that change up the ratios. Just to say, you might want to start determining the best way to transfer to a new larger gear before reaching the optimized slipping point. If you can get it to do so automatically, that would be the ideal! If anyone can, it's you!
Nice work and excellent diagnostic reporting. Don’t ever stop what you’re doing . You only learn by doing .😊
This is excellent work. Thank you!
Love your work. Very impressive! I have a new project Idea as a follow up: Replace the inner rotor with the stator from an Outrunner brushless DC motor. A rotating magnetic field from the stator should be equivalent to your inner rotor. Essentially you would have a internally geared Brushless DC motor!
@@retsetman9698 Also, heat, you would have an unventilated heater inside. which would mess with the modulation amount and the magnet life span. it would be better is the exterior part was stationary, as it would be easier to cool (big surface area, lots of copper to allow easier dissipation), but electromagnet halbachs are weird tho.
@@giuseppebonatici7169i had similar thoughts of an exterior electromagnetic coil set around the outside that could be modulated in such a way as to create a potential locking effect to increase output torque with little &/or variable energy input.
u guys are cool
Great work, development and explanation. 👍👍👍
This is amazing! I wish I could get one of these with a 5:1 ratio for my tractor. Then I could use modern 540rpm CCW impliments from the 3250rpm CW power take-off shaft of my 1980s machine.
Omg. What a hard work you did to make this video!
This reminds me a lot on how toyotas ecvts work. Though while similar I think this gear box scaled up can do some real work.
Thank you for this brilliant demonstration! :)
I'm only part way through the video, so maybe you tested this, but I'm curious about the actual efficiency. Well made gears are quite efficient, and I wonder if induction and eddie currents will work against you just as badly as friction in a traditional gear system would. This is super cool though! It works so much better than I expected.
Edit: oh, nice! You tested the efficiency! I can't wait to see what you do next.
Looks promising. Try 40% glass filled PEEK (Poly Ether Ether Ketone) instead of PLA because it deals with heat better (You may have to upgrade your 3D printer though) and Mu-Metal shielded magnetic bearings?
85% efficiency is quite impressive. Keep going!!
Allright my dude you earned my sub we see you at 500k soon
The sound of the gearbox was so cool!
This could have interesting use cases where obstruction of the mechanism by limbs is a risk factor. Like in places where people are working close to open gears or something, this could possibly used as a safty gear, that would have just enough holding force to move the shaft it needed to move, but any more resistance, like an arm or leg getting in the way, would be enough to push it past the magnets and stopping amputation.
Really cool.
Heckin cool low maintenance gearbox.
Would be cool as heck if there was like a configurator for build it yourself variants.
Wow this is truely amazing
really cool stuff. thanks for showing us
I highly suggest changing your bearings to nitride boron ball bearings. Not only will they not heat up as much, the ceramic bearings wont deform due to heat cycling or extended high rpm runs like metal bearings. They also chew up any junk that gets in the bearing unlike metallic bearings. But best of all? Less rolling resistance for higher system efficiency and less parasitic loss.
First video i watched, hooked instantly. Can't wait to go through your content!
I was just learning about another way to get the benefits of laminated steel without the issues of laminating steel; at least kind of. Either way, think a bunch of iron filings or iron from the ground, picked up with a magnet, set into a binder and poured into the shape of choice.
Edit:
I just tested a small mix of ground iron and clear gorilla glue which upon testing with a digital multimeter showed no conductivity. The properties seem quite similar to laminated cores. I do however have reservations of the particular glue I'm using to cure in large batches. Perhaps epoxy would be a better binder; yet I have not tested that.
That's a pretty good idea, but i would include a diamagnetic filler in addition to the metal. You want it to form flux tubes and you want to trap the flux in those tubes. Otherwise you'll have the flux tubes rearrange as the surface fields change.
@@Unmannedair I'm researching that now, thank you for the info!
Excellent work, thank you for sharing the knowledge.
This is excellent work, well done!
Thanks for building this - I'm trying to make some mag brakes for my bike so I can do some regen but also to save my brakes on really long gradual descents. I keep burning them up...if I only use them for low speeds/holding then they'll last a lot longer and work a lot better when I use them.
that's a huge use case, i was thinking about concentric arrangement and cyclic connections, so n, n+3 etc can fire up on level n, m,m+4 can fire up on level m and cycle through to reduce heat. i was also thinking about using flywheels
This is fantastic. Well Done!
This is so cool. Keep up the good work.
great design and assembly work
Uhm. You need to properly measure output power. 80 percent is shockingly good, but a properly scaled single ratio gearbox has low single digit losses.
Nice work though, and magnets are obviously a cool source of unique properties.
super beautiful video & process ! well done !! would be cool to have a presentation of your machining tools !!! Well done !!
Awesome video man. Great work!
I love your progress:D
Amazing project, dude! Keep it up!
Wonderful video! 👍
Thank you for doing so much work and sharing it with the world. 🏅🥰
This guy could easily make a John Searl Generator with those skills :O
Love thst hi tech timing device.
i have no idea what i'm watching but i like it
Highly innovative probably good for high end ev
Great work sir! So the gearbox is ‘absorbing’ about 3.4 Watts, which it is big enough to dissipate by radiation. Nice.
Actually not exactly correct, that value of 3.4 Watts is achieved by zeroed the scale, PSU gives 160 ish watts, the motor efficiency is about 35% so the power in the input shaft actually should have be around 60 watts, and with the 85%ish gearbox efficiency so now the loss is about 10 Watts, hope I’m clear
I agree to use it provided that it is used for permanent magnets and not inductive magnets that are inefficient and polluting.
This vid got recommended to me out of the blue. I enjoyed it. However I'm not 100% sure about it's application as this is the first vid I've seen. I am a aerospace machinist shop monkey (I make the gears that go into any jet turbine engine. Military or commercial.) so if you ever need any help with that side of things I'll be happy to help. The clicking at the end is likely due to either the amount of runout which gets exaggerated with higher RPMS or (Most likely) the thingy a doo is poorly balanced which is causing runout. And seeing how you somewhat crudely cut those aluminum spacer things I'll be willing to guess that's the main issue. Anyways I love watching these kinds of vids.
Excellent work 🎉
Excellent work
I think this is beautiful for applications where you want slip at certain torque loads.
Yes, slip with no damage, amazing
@@violinviolator5841I will note that there are other ways of doing something similar. Many lathes have a system where the lowest gear ratio is coupled by ball bearings pressed by springs into divots on another gear. That way, when I do something stupid, it overcomes the spring pressure and slips instead of breaking the lathe.
@@arthurmoore9488 That's cool. I wonder what applications there are where this is specifically better suited than a mechanical design such as your lathe employs.
@@gormauslanderProbably anywhere that slip torque is expected regularly. I've seen the design for my lathe have trouble re-engaging, but it's fine since it's more like a circuit breaker than something I ever want to use. Direct drive, or near direct drive, hydraulics and electric motors could also probably slip without damage, but anything with a gearbox this has potential as compared to clutch pads.
This is wonderful.
Woah thats a super nice improvement. Especially with the magnets not heating up at all. I wonder what else you could improve from here?
Dang this is amazing stuff.
Great content! Very detailed and summarized, the quality of your instruments sup superb. Any chance this Mag gearbox will run in conjunction with a over unity device or magnet motor!?
Screw the haters and naysayers! Keep innovating!
To say there is no wear is to fail to understand magnets. There is going to be wear. It's just not going to manifest as visible wear. It's going to manifest as an increasing random scattering of magnetic domains over time. Essentially the magnets will stop being magnets as the wear increases. The harder the system is pushed and the more heat it generates, the faster this will happen.
Great observation. I also suspect micro heating of the magnet seats. Whatever polymer he’s using as a housing will slowly embrittle.
Would love to try making one of these myself someday, they look fun! xD
if you're trying to get rid of the clicking noise, you could try putting some lapping compound inside and running it slowly for a while.
Freaking awesome man!
Someone could make a more efficient and slightly larger version of this and easily get 50nm of torque output. This could have so many applications in industry! Especially if over torqued it wont break a tooth on a gear assembly.
The only real world application for this I know of is in space. Where moving parts must work perfectly for decades, but don't necessarily need to be powerful.
having reliable gears never fail is useful for all of future society imagine building a machine and it just werks with no maintenance, this is a huge step in that.
Maybe something that can't be contaminated to oil, like hospital equipments
@@rian0xFFF true reliability is good for stuff like that but does any of it use gearbox? a similiar yet different variance of this tech perhaps
You could spend all those magnets on a servo itself. You could just run the "final drive" electronically directly..
Likewiise you can replace all the middle parts with wires,
@@UnrebornMortuus Dude, magnets have higher friction between them and heat things up by induction.
For a given weight (= cost/volume/size) of permanent magnets, an Hallbach array gives much LESS magnetic field than a traditional array + back iron. Commercial brushless motors always use back iron to close the magnetic circuit and never Hallback arrays.
Most impressive. ❤
Monumental work!
New subscriber here and this is incredible!!! I need one of these....
This could be great for split AC. Evaporator noise are from the AC turbine
wow. Can you invent bicycle magnetic planetary hub? I accept 85% efficiency for zero maintenance.
I was just thinking this, if it doesn't need to be fixed or serviced then it's worth it
So genius!
This is awesome! Great video man!
Do you think this can be made with a calculated slip? So it acts more like a clutch?
I love this!
This is awesome.
Love it! Great follow up video! Nice work! What is the outer diameter of the whole assembly? From an engineering standpoint, it would be great to see what the maximum torque that could be transmitted, with the restriction of making the gearbox diameter the same as the motor (like a traditional DC motor sold on amazon with a spur gear based gearbox).
Check out the description
Do you think a minimized or megamized(?) system could be used to increase efficiency of a hand crank generator? This would be fascinating from a survival energy perspective.
Nice research video🎉❤, can you explain what is the point making a magnetic gearbox instead of cutting conventional gears?
Awesome stuff! Have you ever looked into 3phase torque conversion? That is, 3 phase motor such as any brushless hobby motor used as an alternator to transfer energy to another motor to have non-linear torque transfer.
great job looks exciting
Excellent work!
You could put such a modulator between the stator and rotor of a conventional BLDC. How extreme of a gear ratio is it possible to achieve?
It would be nice if PCBWay or JLC or whoever did silicon steel lamination fabrication.