Several electric vehicles’ owner’s manuals lack detailed explanations of how brushless motors work, as you will find when you open the manual. Our language has become accustomed to combustion engines over the years because they have been around for a long time. The car hobbyist could walk into a room and talk about car parts and performance with one of Detroit’s Big 3 engineers but who is connected to one of these engineering firms.
There is a spreading acceptance of electric motors beyond physicists and engineers at present. Here’s a simple explanation, which is well explained.
- Consider a windmill with five blades and copper wire wrapping the blades. Blades remain stationary during the process.
- There is a rotating circle that is one inch outside the blades, with half of it having the North magnet polarization and half having the South magnet polarization. As a result of cutting gaps between them, the magnets appear to be separated, rather than as if they are a complete circle.
- It is similar to flipping a light switch to turn on and off the windmill blades. A magnetic polarization occurs when the blade is powered up, attracting the magnet surrounding the circle. The switch is turned off once the blade has passed, and power is provided to the next blade of the windmill.
Keeping the circle spinning is the goal, but there is more to it than that. Kinetic energy transferred from the circle to the wheels and other components of the vehicle goes to the wheels and components of the vehicle. An optimum rotation speed can be found by finding the sweet spot. As the windmill blades spin at a rate controlled by the central computer, sensors provide power to the vehicle’s central computer. A brushless DC power motor can vary in many ways, but these are the fundamental principles.
