Online Lecture by dr. María Teresa Pérez Prado

Additive manufacturing of energy efficient electric motors

Head of the Sustainable Metallurgy group, IMDEA Materials Institute, Spain

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Title:
Additive manufacturing of energy efficient electric motors.

Abstract:
Assuming an average loss level of 5%, the energy dissipated by the ~8 billion electric motors operating in the EU corresponds to roughly 30% of the total energy consumption of a country such as Spain. Additive manufacturing (AM) of Fe-based metallic glasses offers a potential route to produce e-motor components that mitigate these losses, owing to their superior soft-magnetic properties and near-net-shape capability. Nevertheless, substantial obstacles persist for AM processing of these materials: suppressing crystallization to preserve the amorphous phase, minimizing porosity and residual stresses, ensuring adequate feedstock processability, and tuning magnetic properties through post-processing. Overcoming these challenges requires an integrated approach that couples alloy design, process optimization, and advanced characterization.

This lecture will review recent progress on process-parameter optimization for AM of Fe-based metallic glasses [1-3] and will highlight strategies to precisely regulate thermal histories during printing so as to limit defects and maintain amorphicity in components with complex geometries. It will be shown that a combined methodology, linking computational modeling with targeted experimental validation, can deliver tailored processing windows that improve both manufacturability and performance of Fe-based metallic-glass parts. The lecture will conclude with a discussion of how these advances move AM closer to enabling high-efficiency electric motors with reduced energy losses.

[1] M. Rodríguez-Sánchez, A. D. Boccardo, S. Sadanand, A. Ghavimi, R. Busch, P. Sharangi, E. Ferrara, G. Barrera, P. Tiberto, D. Tourret, I. Gallino, M. T. Pérez-Prado, Laser powder bed fusion of an Fe-based metallic glass using time delays, Additive Manufacturing, 110 (2025) 104922.
[2] S. Sadanand, M. Rodríguez-Sánchez, A. Ghavimi, R. Busch, P. Sharangi, P.M. Tiberto, E. Ferrara, G. Barrera, L. Thorsson, H.J. Wachter, I. Gallino, M.T. Pérez-Prado, Laser powder bed fusion of a nanocrystalline Finemet Fe-based metallic glass for soft magnetic applications, Journal of Laser Applications, 36 (2024) 042029.
[3] M. Rodríguez-Sánchez, S. Sadanand, A. Ghavimi, R. Busch, P.M. Tiberto, E. Ferrara, G. Barrera, L. Thorsson, H.J. Wachter, I. Gallino, M.T. Pérez-Prado, Relating laser powder bed fusion process parameters to (micro)structure and to soft magnetic behaviour in a Fe-based bulk metallic glass, Materialia, 35 (2024) 102111.

This session was chaired by prof. María Santofimia (TU Delft)