GreenSpur’s Axial Flux Generator Innovation

Jason Moody from GreenSpur discusses their innovative axial flux
generator technology, which promises to reduce weight and
complexity in wind turbines, offering greater efficiency and lower
maintenance costs. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly
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YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the
show? Email us! Today we're excited to have Jason Moody,
chairman of GreenSpur, joining us to discuss a generator technology
that could fundamentally alter the path of wind energy. While the
wind industry has been scaling up turbine sizes, we've hit a
critical challenge. Generators are becoming massively heavy,
complex, and expensive to maintain. GreenSpur is taking a different
approach entirely. They perfected axial flux generator technology
that can dramatically reduce weight, eliminate cooling systems. And
use any type of magnet from simple faite to rare earth materials.
This isn't just another incremental improvement. It's a completely
different way of generating power that could solve some of offshore
wind's biggest headaches. Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining
Light on Wind. Energy's brightest innovators. This is the Progress
Powering tomorrow. Jason, welcome to the program.
Thank [00:01:00] you. Thanks a. Hi Joel. Well, let's
start off with the elephant in the room for offshore wind turbines
manufacturing. Uh, there's some fundamental challenges that are
facing them as we approach sort of the 20 megawatt stage and
getting further offshore. Weight becomes a big problem. Jason
Moody: Yeah, it does. For, for years they've been getting
bigger and bigger, and you can see that the industry just wants to
push for that next size. But with that, the generators are getting
very, very heavy. So the last direct drive generator that we
evaluated was in excess of 150 tons. Now, that's not a, not a small
machine anymore, but what what we're trying to do is introduce a
new technology. That can hopefully address that problem and some
others as well.  Allen Hall (2): So when you put a very
heavy generator on top of a tower, that increases everything
underneath of it, right?  Jason Moody: Yeah. The
foundations grow exponentially. The [00:02:00]steelwork and
the structure has to grow. Then the cell itself, just based on
size, lot more composite parts. Everything's bigger.  Joel
Saxum: So we're talking like here, kind of traditional
offshore wind fixed bottom right. That's an issue. The foundations
have to grow, uh, exponentially to get these, to hold up this
weight. But when another thing that's happening globally, right?
The big push for floating offshore wind. So if now you're talking
about putting more and more and more weight on something that's
actually dynamic, right? So that kind of, uh, what does that do to
the, the whole system.  Jason Moody: That's a, it's a
different, um, engineering challenge, but it's mainly in the steel
structure and the ballast in, in those, uh, in those systems. So
the street, the steel pylon becomes very thick, becomes very heavy,
uh, to hold that weight on top. But most of the time what you found
in these newer next gen floating systems is they've gone to geared
systems, which is a big move in the whole industry for both
onshore, offshore, and, and everything in between. Everyone's
moving to hybrid [00:03:00] and geared systems, 
Allen Hall (2): and hybrid and geared systems get even more
complicated, which is the problem, right? Is that we're, we're
trying to lower the cost of energy, but as we go bigger in scale,
we sort of lose those efficiencies. It, it doesn't scale up with
the efficiencies. It actually, you start getting more complicated
because the generator itself is a limitation.  Jason
Moody: It is not just on electrical efficiency either. It's,
it's limited because a lot of these generators, as they spin
faster, they get hotter. And then with hotter generators, you need
fancier and, and more high tech cooling systems and, and there's
another point of failure. So the LCUE really does start to suffer
in these more complex advanced systems.  Joel Saxum: The
size of these things too, like as we get bigger and bigger and
bigger, we're trying to scale up like. The idea of working on
something, like, I think about this like working on a truck, right?
You go from working on a truck or working on a car to working on,
uh, a semi go from that to working on, you know, a big boat engine
or [00:04:00] something of that sort. And now we're still
talking at small scale, but the tools, you need, the ability to
handle and move things like it becomes exponentially more
difficult. So as we get to, I know like we were talking earlier off
air, Siemens has their 21 and a half megawatt machine installed. I
can't imagine the amount, the, the types of tooling, lifting
mechanisms and stuff just to be able to work on the things. So
that's, that becomes even more of an impasse, especially in
offshore operations as we're trying to keep these things running.
Jason Moody: Yeah. There's a whole booming and emerging
industry on the infrastructure just to move and install these
parts, uh, offshore. It's, uh, just to hoist some of this big heavy
equipment up into the na cell. It's, uh, it's. Really quite
difficult, but getting even more difficult as time goes on 
Allen Hall (2): and there's more components up tower than ever
before. As we get to these bigger generators, cooling is a massive
issue and if you follow, uh, all the patents by all the OEMs right
now, you'll see that they're trying to figure out
ways [00:05:00] to provide cooling up tower to the
generator and all the gears and everything else moving up top. And
it, it becomes a massive problem. So not only do you have a very
heavy generator and relatively complex generator, now you're adding
a coolant system, which is another complicated, heavy system on top
of it.  Jason Moody: Yeah, you're absolutely right, Alan.
It, it is getting more complicated and the thermal management in
the new cell, it is, it's only going to get worse. Allen Hall
(2): Greens spur is doing something radically different. And
I've been following Greensboro for, for a number of years now
because, uh, you have been based in part of, been supported by ORE
Catapult and you have a different generator design. It's actually
not a new concept, but maybe the implementation I would describe as
new. But moving from a standard sort of two cylinder design, you
have a rotor. And you have a stator on the outside, which we see in
cars and everywhere. It's basically
every [00:06:00] generator or motor in the world has
these two rotating, these two cylindrical pieces. Moving from that
into an actual flux design. And when we talk about flux, we're
talking about the magnetic fields that are generated to make these
things spin or to create power, actual has a lot of advantages that
haven't been. Taken, taken into consideration when we're building
massive wind turbines.  Jason Moody: Yeah, precisely. And
thanks. Um, the, the way that Greensboro has approached this isn't
using a brand new technology. It's, the way to describe it is to
perfect it in a new application. So axial flux as a generator. Um,
it's been around a long time and the advantages of using axial flux
as a generator have been well documented and known. Uh, for, for,
again, a long time. But what we've managed to do is we've scaled it
from what might be a desktop size, um, unit up into the multi
megawatt sizes. Now we've [00:07:00] got, um, uh, a
generator that's, um, been tested at the ORE Catapult, and, and
that's three meters in diameter. It's, it's a huge machine. Um,
and, and that's some of the benefits of Axial Flux can be seen in
how you control and how you can manage the, the magnets being on
the tire face instead of the tire tread,  Allen Hall
(2): right? And so now you have a series of discs. You have a
what call a state or disc and a rotor disc, and they kind of, you
can stack them together. So as you want to add more power
production, you just add more discs, which, uh, is a really simple
way of changing the size of a generator. But the, the key is, is
that you have, uh, the coils stationary. You have the magnets on
another disc, and they're spinning around, which is what's creating
the power. You can use a lot of different magnets in this
particular design. You can use [00:08:00] standard,
simple off the shelf magnets or rare earth magnets. It's sort, and
it, your, the actual design is sort of ambivalent to it. Jason
Moody: Absolutely. One of our, uh, one of our taglines, one of
our USPS and how we've, um, adopted the design methodology is to be
magnet agnostic. Drivetrain agnostic, which means we can be geared
or direct drive even down to the, the coil material. We're
completely adaptable and scalable to whatever our clients might
need. The key is it's very quick to, to change these parameters in
our modeling software so we can easily design the most optimized,
uh, generator.  Allen Hall (2): You can really drive the
weight down in sort of two ways. You can use rare earth magnets,
much more powerful, and you can also remove the copper and put in
aluminum for the coils, which drives weight down. So at the end of
the day, you have and. You have a very efficient design, but you
can also dump the cooling system. You don't need
a [00:09:00] fluid cooling system to create, for this
generator to maintain its power output.  Jason
Moody: Yeah, so if we were to go tor to toe with a traditional
radial system of, let's just pick 15 megawatt, we would expect to
be 25% lighter,