Pilot plant 6: WILO

The leading partner for Pilot Plant 6 is Wilo. The Wilo Group is one of the world’s leading premium providers of pumps and pump systems for the building services, water management and industrial sectors. In the past decade, we have developed from a hidden champion into a visible and connected champion.

Today, Wilo has around 8,000 employees worldwide. Their innovative solutions, smart products and individual services move water in an intelligent, efficient and climate-friendly manner. Wilo is also making an important contribution to climate protection with our sustainability strategy and in conjunction with our partners. They are already the digital pioneer in the industry with their products and solutions, processes and business models.

Pilot-scale production of fully dense Mn-Al-C magnets

Fabrication of fully dense PASSENGER’s Mn-Al-C and improved ferrite magnets will be done by hot-pressing and hot-deformation. These techniques have clear advantages over the conventional sintering process such as precise shaping with narrow geometric tolerances; avoidance of cost-intensive reworking such as grinding; multi-polar magnet with high properties can be manufactured by hot deformation.

The hot-deformation technique proposed in PASSENGER for the fabrication of Mn-Al-C fully dense magnets will represent a huge advance in the fabrication of magnets with a broad range of applications (such as motors for electrical and hybrid vehicles as well as generators for wind turbines). WILO’s process will make possible the fabrication of high-performance, comparable to their sintered counterpart, ring magnets directly in their final shape and with no need of costly post-machining (as already demonstrated by WILO and TUDA with the fabrication of hot-deformed Nd-Fe-B magnets).

Innovation: construction of a fully operational rotor of a pump motor integrating PASSENGER’s novel magnets

PASSENGER’s novel permanent magnets, fabricated by IMA, KOLEKTOR and WILO, will then be integrated into functional prototypes and tested under operating conditions. Building upon TUDA’s work, Wilo will apply in PASSENGER its patent related to the invention of a permanent magnet rotor for an electrical machine, with a soft magnetic core and a number of circumferentially arranged permanent magnets (a pseudo magnetic pole being created in the iron core in the circumferential direction between two adjacent permanent magnets).

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Fabricating sintered magnets