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The ThinGap Motor's unique design has many advantages.

All ThinGap Rotors are made up of outer and inner rotating irons to remove the necessity for magnetic attraction between the Rotor and Stator, dramatically increasing the smoothness of the motor. This Rotor design also allows designers wide latitude in attachments for power take-off; shafts of almost any design on one or both ends, weldments, screws, etc. can all be used.

All ThinGap Stators are constructed of etched copper sheets, laminated with insulating layers. This construction creates a rigid coil with a very high degree of consistency from motor to motor. Axial length, copper pattern and connections are used to create different torque and speed properties. There is no magnetic saturation, meaning that the torque limit is directly related to the ability to cool the motor.


The ThinGap Embedded Motor design provides exceptional cooling, allowing the motor to be driven hard at high currents result is a line of very smooth motors with very high power to weight ratios. In fact, on many models, continuous torque increases with rpm due to the cooling effect of the Rotor and the lack of iron in the Stator. Contact ThinGap for more details on this phenomenon.

The Torque-Speed curve for two representative ThinGap Embedded Motors is shown to the right.

Note how the torque actually increases at higher rpm, due to the increased cooling caused by both the inner and outer irons/magnets rotation and circulating air.

Current and torque are linear until the temperature limit is reached, since ThinGap Embedded Motors do not magnetically saturate. At the temperature limit, the magnets will demagnetize (typically about 120c) or the copper in the coil will fuse.

A thermistor is embedded in the base of each coil for temperature monitoring, but the output should be considered relative rather than absolute due to conduction through the length of the coil.

Increasing torque with increasing rpm and no magnetic saturation provides a large amount of power for a given weight and package size. 

ThinGap Embedded Motors are not well-suited to low-speed or "traction" applications, since at 0 rpm there is no air circulating around the coil. The Motors depend on convection cooling from the air circulating around the motor, as opposed to more traditional iron-core motors which use conduction to transfer heat from the copper to the iron core.

Active cooling of a ThinGap Embedded Motor increases available torque dramatically for the same reason - the motor will not saturate. Active cooling is facilitated through the open-frame construction, and simple ducting of a fresh-air supply, which can increase the allowable current (hence torque) significantly. ThinGap will be running quantitative experiments with Active cooling in the future.

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