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I didn't know what a reluctance motor was until about a week ago. In my typical fashion, I didn't pay any attention to a technology that was out of my price range...none what so ever. Took one look at Paul's AC controller thread and assumed it was for induction...I mean, that's what Tesla runs as did a few others; assumed the rest were running a form of brushless DC. Oops. Very close, very similar, but not quite...
FWIW, the netgain, like most of the others these days, is not a simple reluctance motor...they call it a "Synchronous Reluctance Internal Permanent Magnet (SRIPM)" motor. The permanent magnets are equally important as the reluctance side of things.
And to make matters worse, there are other names for the same thing!
I can thank google for sniffing my searches and recommending a couple of youtube posts, including Tesla's "new" motor tech...which appears to have taken them a few years longer than everyone else to adopt, unless that was just on the model X which the video was about.
Anyway, just looked at the Netgain motors. The $4k US is prohibitive to me, at least for a just-for-the-fun-of-it project, but...nice efficiency map. You'd basically be running in the >85% area of the map most of the time, compared to a BLDC which would max out there. That's impressive. And all by hiding magnets inside of laminations...I wonder why it took so long to figure that out and bring it to the market. Ok, I know switching speeds/losses had something to do with it, but still...oh, and that Netgain controller only weighing 9lbs is also impressive, for the power output.
I gotta go, I'm drooling and this is making my head hurt to think about!
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