Project duration: 1 January 2021 – 31 December 2023

Objective

Additive manufacturing (AM) holds potential for revolutionizing electromechanical industry. Bottleneck is the availability of materials. We aim at upscaling soft magnetic powders for AM. Electrical machine (EM) and drive industry, with a value of 6.3 B€ in Europe, is among potential end-users. Consortium combines powder and EM experts. Parts of powder products are validated by CRF and Siemens. Powder commercialization is led by Elkem.

The solution (technology)

The SOMA project is answering to electric mobility (e-mobility) demand for more optimized electromechanical devices with enhanced performance, lower material consumption and life cycle cost. This demand is pushing the manufacturers and research community to explore non-conventional designs and manufacturing methods. Additive manufacturing technologies are opening up new possibilities for realizing novel magnetic circuit designs. Earlier studies have shown that by tailoring material compositions together with optimized processing parameters and particularly, with post-treatments, high performance soft magnetic components can be manufactured by laser powder bed fusion (L-PBF). Further, it has been shown that through topology optimization, the weight of an electrical machine can be decreased significantly without compromising the other key characteristics. The SOMA project is focused on the upscaling of soft magnetic alloys tailored for additive manufacturing with minimized amount of critical raw materials. Furthermore, SOMA will demonstrate a manufacturing route where the restrictions of conventional manufacturing methods do not apply enabling groundbreaking changes in designs and consequently leading to lightweight and material efficient solutions for, e.g., future e-mobility.

Partnership

  • Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd. VTT (Lead Partner), Finland
  • Siemens AG, Germany
  • Gemmate Technologies, Italy
  • Elkem AS Technology Kristiansand, Norway
  • Research Center Fiat, Italy

Learn more about the project here.