Magnet-free induction motor aims to nearly halve carbon emissions

The article is kind of word soup, but I think the idea is that instead of using electromagnets interacting with permanent magnets to generate force, the motor uses electromagnets on both the rotor and stator. And it isn't nessesarily more efficient than a conventional electric motor, but the claim is that it costs less emissions overall, since rare earth magnets don't need to be mined to produce it. Also, it's brushless, or in other words power is transmitted to the rotor by induction instead of by electrical contacts, possibly using the electromagnets in the stator, but that's unclear.

It's a neat idea.

This article doesn’t explain anything innovative. There are plenty of motors around, using “wireless induction” (as opposed to some other kind of induction?), operating at very high efficiency.

> The two companies aim to cut overall carbon footprint by more than 40% as compared to a permanent-magnet e-motor with equivalent power.

Modern motors, with or without magnets, are efficient enough that saving 40% of emissions isn’t going to happen. (Or maybe they mean sometime strange by “overall carbon”).

For what it's worth, pretty much all ceiling fans work this way. They are brushless and both the stator and the rotor use copper windings instead of permanent magnets. The trick here is that ceiling fans get the necessary voltage switching for free since they run on AC. With DC you're going to have to have do that with electronic switching.

"The MCT system replaces the physical magnets and mechanically brush-powered electromagnetic windings commonly used in motor rotor designs with wound coils magnetized via inductive electricity sent from a wireless transmitter." (From the article)

I think it is telling that they don't mention any efficiency numbers. Hopefully I'm wrong.