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New Dyson Digital Motor Superfactory Comes On-Line, Pointing Towards Big (or Super-Small?) Things to Come
Time is money, and James Dyson has proven he's willing to spend both in search of product design breakthroughs. The British inventor famously spent years perfecting his Dyson Vacuum through the '70s and '80s, and has since invested a considerable amount in R&D; since 1999 the company has quietly spent more than US $160 million researching digital motors alone.
That motor research has yielded fruit, as the company is now able to produce digitally-controlled motors so small and absurdly powerful—their V4 motor, which powers the Dyson Airblade, lives in a housing just 85mm wide yet can go from 0–92,000rpm in less than 0.7 seconds—that they've invested $79 million in a new hi-tech motor manufacturing facility in Singapore.
While Dyson has already been producing their own motors for ten years there, they'd done it in partnership with a local firm, something like what Apple does with Foxconn. By opening their own facility they're not only doubling their capacity, they're gaining the ability to produce in absolute privacy.This suggests one of two things. The first is that the Airblade market has suddenly doubled, justifying the investment. But the second, more likely scenario is that Dyson will be expanding their product design portfolio, harnessing these super-powerful, super-tiny motors to more applications.
What might those applications be? A Dyson engineer we corresponded with was mum on whatever future products the company might be planning. You'll have to read between the lines here:
Increased power density of the Dyson Digital Motors offers the ability to install these motors into places traditional [brushless DC] motors cannot. The high speed operation allows for fast dynamic performance giving the user speedy response....
[Our] developments in motor technology offer enormous potential to make machines that are smaller and more effective.... But I can reveal that this investment in Singapore will allow us more control over production processes, so we have room to grow - ramping up production as we need to.
Okay readers, any guesses? I for one would love to see Dyson move big-time into power tools. With their existing expertise in dust collection and their super-powerful motors, I'd bet they could make even Festool sweat.
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These motors have some problems, as all things do. Balance is absolutely imperative with so much inertial energy: high speed CNC spindles and vacuum pumps have massive casings to contain any catastrophic destruction. Force-structure oscillation coupling is very dangerous and surprisingly common with high speed spindles, and can cause eardrum exploding harmonics upto catastrophic self destruction. Also, small high speed motors tend to have low torque so applications such as shop tools, drills, saws, will just stall the spindle as soon as the cutting gets tough, exceptions for small cutting forces such as dental and surgical tools.
As air moving devices though, these are excellent.
You are correct - these are just brushless motors. They have done a bang-up marketing job to trick otherwise competent product developers and consumers into thinking they have made a new type of motor.
Just an opinion from an engineer.
Having worked with (normal) brushless DC motors, I'm very curious as to how Dyson's operate.
Very cool for an independent inventor (at first, anyway) to grow as big as having your own motor factory on the other side of the world.