Investigation of a 2 V 1.1 kW MOSFET commutated DC motor

This paper proposes an extremely-low voltage high current MOSFET-based drive architecture. A single-turn multiphase winding design allows a copper fill factor approaching one. The single-turn coil design leads to a low EMF voltage and high current design which requires a matched drive system. To identify the technical design obstacles and verify the feasibility of the proposed architecture, a small scale prototype is built and successfully tested. The described prototype consists of an extremely-low voltage 13-phase single-turn coil permanent magnet DC motor and MOSFET-based commutator. The prototype's locked rotor-torque and no-load power consumption, as well as the EMF voltage measurements are presented and the DC motor constants are extracted. The experimental results from the prototype measurements indicate a promising potential for cost-effective extremely-low voltage high current MOSFET-based drive systems.