Sunday, December 15, 2019

Tesla power train

The following may be a bit technical but I do get serious from time to time.
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I was watching a “factory made” segment yesterday about the Tesla electric car.  They said the car developed 450 hp.     W H A T??      I looked it up on Wikipedia.  It said the car developed 248 HP. That is still way too much for an AC motor.  They said that the motor weighed only 70 pounds and was a 4 pole A.C. induction motor.
The stator looked to be about the same size as a G.E.  80 frame hermetic motor.  The 80 frame stator core punchings weigh 10 pounds per inch of stack.  A 9 inch stack core would weigh 90 pounds and develop only 50 HP at 1800 rpm. (G.E.Spec) ,  that is 5.55 hp per inch of stack.  A 70 pound stator would be 7 inches long and develop 38.88 hp at 1800 rpm. Then I looked at the Tesla motor speed.  The dang thing turns at 14,000, (yes fourteen thousand) RPM.
The plot thickens.  14000 rpm vs. 1800 rpm (STD 4 pole design synchronous speed) is a factor of 7.77.     7.77 * 38.88hp = 302 hp.  Factor in about 88 % efficiency and 8% slip for the rotor “chasing” the field and you have 244 HP. This is close to the 248 hp claimed by the company.  That entire HP is gained through speed, not brute strength.
The automobile has a single speed, fixed gear transmission.  If the transmission is “fixed”, then the motor speed is variable.  The problem is that an A.C. induction motor speed is not variable.  The only way to vary the speed would be to vary the frequency of the input voltage.  Now let’s calculate the actual CPS of the Tesla motor.    60/1800 = X/14,000.  X = 466 CPS.   There was a three-cylinder Harnishfager diesel generator used on the Nike Hercules missile system. The generator operated at 400 CPS, which was considered the same as D.C.  -----  No inverter required???
Someone is going to wonder why we have 200 HP motors the size of a 55 gallon drum when we can get it from a motor the size of a 10 quart bucket.


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