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SPARK and PEIK to Research New Generation of Motors and Drives for Electric and Hybrid Vehicles

January 14, 2020

Dan M. Ionel, SPARK and PEIK Director, electrical and computer engineering professor and L. Stanley Pigman Chair in Power, will serve as the principal investigator.

The UK SPARK Lab and Power and Energy Institute of Kentucky (PEIK) will research a new generation of motors and drives for electric and hybrid vehicles thanks to a $750,000 award from the Department of Energy. Dan M. Ionel, SPARK and PEIK Director, electrical and computer engineering professor and L. Stanley Pigman Chair in Power, will serve as the principal investigator and lead a team including postdoctoral scholar Peng Han and research assistant students. 

The new project, which has been competitively awarded under the US Department of Energy, Advanced Vehicle Technologies Research Program DE-0002014, seeks to develop revolutionary concepts that will significantly increase the power density and decrease the cost of motors and drives for high efficiency electric and hybrid vehicles. The research will consider novel magnetic flux doubling machine configurations with permanent magnets in the stator and special reluctance rotors and multi-phase power electronics converters with Silicon Carbide (SiC) Wide Band Gap (WBG) devices.