Magnetic Bike Transmission

Tom, I posted this to a Telegram account that may or may not have been yours… There are 2 Tom Stanton accounts. Hope this is the right one. I posted a comment to your YouTube video of the bike magnetic CVT and sent you an invite on LinkedIn. I did quite a lot of work on a bike CVT design last year including writing some software to optimize it. I thought you might like to have a chat about it. My design uses two concentric “pancake” axial flux motors. Predicted efficiency is in the high 90% range and I optimized it for high efficiency across the whole operating range including low speed, high torque. The problem with your design is obviously that you lose power in the eddy currents. The key to my design is to use the two motors, one generates torque by generating power (regen) and the other one generates torque by consuming power (motor). Motor controllers shunt power between them. The eddy current losses are kept to a minimum using litz wire in the motor windings. Get in touch and we can arrange a phone call to discuss. I actually ran my idea past the engineers at Grin who do the Phaserunner BLDC controller and after a bit of to and fro they conceded it would work. You have quite a lot of talent at actually making stuff, I thought I might be able to help with a bit of direction so you end up with something that works really well and doesn’t disappoint. The main problems with my current design are a) trying to fit everything inside a bike wheel form factor and b) making it road legal — for a human powered vehicle really want to use low rolling resistance bike tyres but for interesting levels of power it needs to be licensed as a motorcycle with load and speed rated tyres. Please get in touch, it’ll be fun to have a chat!

Henry Butterworth

I love the concept. Could you remove the heat by creating fins in the copper plate so that it pushes air over itself? With heat reduction, the specific heat capacity of the copper may help with the amount of emf available from the disc. I'm just thinking of the Cern LHC; if you super cool the magnets (or cool the disc), the force applied to the magnets is more efficiently transferred to the disc. Just a thought, it may not work at all. ;-)

Neil Devonshire

Well done! If you ever need (free) supermagnets again for another video, please contact me. (I own supermagnete.com). We will gladly provide them for free.

Thank you for letting me know Tom. I thought it was in response to me telling you that a company is interested in your hovercraft rudder idea.

Hello David, Glad you enjoyed the video! Unfortunately the Telegram comments are scams. I've tried removing and reporting the accounts, but they keep coming back. It's something I've got to manually keep on top of, which gets difficult. Regards, Tom

Tom Stanton

Hello Tom, yet another superb video, very informative as always. I have been wondering where you had gone but glad to see that you are alright. You asked me to contact you but I cannot operate Telegraph; would not know where to start. I look forward to hearing from you. Regards. David