And what is that for the uninitiated? What is a radial

motor? Yeah, so a radial motor is one where you have the rotating part, the rotor in the center, and on the outside you have the stator, and the flux travels radially, and hence the name radial flux.

And my PhD really took the initiative to look at, well, are there any other topologies, any other types of motors that could reduce weight, in particular, improve efficiency? And so this led to an interest in axial flux motors, they're sometimes called pancake motors because they're very axially narrow.

The nice bit of serendipity or good fortune was very near the start of my PhD, stumbled into this fascinating topology or type of axial flux motor called the, we called it the YASA topology, which basically stands for yokeless and segmented armature.

And you can kind of see that here that this is the stator and the stator is split into a series of segments and there is no big armature holding it together, which is what you get on radial machines.

Now, the beauty of this is, I mean, you can pick this up.

I was blown away at the weight of it.

Tim, is he the patent holder of this? So the technology's got

Mm.

We then, um...

YASA is a specific type of axial flux motor where, and again, forgive me for the jargon, we have removed the stator yoke.

Now, for non-motor experts, which is probably most people on the, uh, podcast, um, the, the stator is made up of a set of teeth which you put windings on, and those teeth are held together by a big lump of iron called a stator yoke, and that is required because the flux travels from one tooth through the yoke back through the other teeth.

Now, the Y- the YASA trick is to remove that stator yoke completely and have two rotors such that the flux just travels straight through those teeth.

Now, th- why is that important, is the stator yoke can sometimes make up 50, 60% of the mass of the entire motor.

So we've just taken a 30% benefit going axial flux.

Or are we j- are we- am I jumping the gun a little bit too, too quickly?