16 July/August 2024 | E-Mobility Engineering The CTO of YASA Motors tells Rory Jackson how his axial-flux ‘pancake’ motors originated from a complex algorithm and a simple question Going flat out Today, Tim Woolmer is the CTO of axial-flux electricmachine manufacturer (and wholly owned Mercedes-Benz subsidiary) YASA Motors, but his initial entry into the world of e-mobility was something of a happy accident. “When I was in my undergraduate years, Oxford University had this extraordinary algorithm for assigning challenging projects to fourth-year engineering students, but when it had to choose one for me, the algorithm broke; so, very unusually, I was told that I had to decide and write my own project brief,” Woolmer recounts. “I took some time to think about what I was really interested in. This was 2003, and I soon found myself asking why there weren’t any electric cars. This was after the General Motors EV-1 had been killed, and still pre-Tesla. Really, there was nothing other than small, electric city cars. But what we did have were the first mass-produced, small mobile phones, MP3 players and other consumer electronics running on Li-ion batteries.” Compared with the poor energy density of lead-acid batteries, and the minor improvements of nickelmetal-hydride, Li-ion represented a breakthrough, which indicated to Woolmer that EVs were on their way. While he was not yet focused on electric motors, he took stock of the sheer size and money potential of the automotive industry, and determined there had to be some fundamental reason why EVs had not worked yet, despite several competent companies having tried their hand at them. “I found a supervisor who was similarly interested and started a project investigating that reason. I concluded it was all about range, which it was at the time, and developed a small, wireless induction charger that worked over an air gap,” Woolmer explains. “My big dream back then was that we’d dig up all the roads in Britain, or maybe the whole world, and you’d bury these induction chargers so everyone could drive over them, and be recharging their electric cars all the time. It was a great and borderline utopian idea, if you ignore that no-one digs up critical infrastructure unless it’s an emergency – such is the idealism one has at university – but it led to my supervisor bringing me into another project.” That project was a hydrogen sportscar being developed by the Morgan Motor Axial-flux motors like this one (made for a Ferrari HEV powertrain) are manufactured by YASA Motors and based on a design by Tim Woolmer (Image courtesy of YASA)
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