[ Music ]
>> Good afternoon.
My name is Ali Kujoory.
I'm one of the organizers
of this lecture series.
I would like to welcome
you all this second lecture
in this semester, and in
fact the hundred and, hundred
and twenty, twenty-fifth
lecture in the series,
since we started in 2006.
Before I use our lecture,
lecture today, let me mention
that at five thirty Miss
Goodhard has ordered pizza,
it's going to arrive
at five thirty,
and then the next lecture
will be on October the fifth.
And the title of the talk
is Lidar Solutions Using
Vernier-Tuned Distributed
Bragg Reflector Lasers,
by Doctor Dennis
Derickson, he's the chair
of Electrical Engineering
at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.
Our guest speaker for today
is Mr Richard Halstead
and the title of his talk is
the Humble Electric Motor,
Enabling Science and Technology.
Mr Richard Halstead is the
founder, president, and chairman
of Empire Magnetics
Incorporated,
providing electric motors
for challenging environments
since 1987.
He comes with many achievements,
including head of Wind sail,
Vertical Axis Wind turbines,
designed by scientist
and Russian state rocket
centre, funded by US Department
of Energy at Lawrence
Livermore national laboratory
to prevent WMD scientists
from working
for Al Qaeda, how about that!
CTO of Power Tree Corporation, a
flywheel energy storage company,
CTO of Biomass to Bioenergy,
director of North Bay
World Trade Association,
pocket anything Comp motor
division Western Regional Sales
Manager, Linear Motor
Product Manager,
Manager of Special Projects
department and so on.
So, it's my pleasure to
to have him here, and his,
his now, he has the floor now.
[ Applause ]
Thank you.
Before I start, a couple
of very simple things,
would you raise your hands if
you are an engineering student.
Okay, now I know.
How many of you are electrical?
Any clinical?
Next, I wear a hearing aid, so
if you ask a question, speak up.
Other than that,
we're ready to go.
Somebody's been pushing buttons.
Okay. My company makes
special electric motors,
we don't do the standard ones.
We sell through an international
distribution network.
Almost all of our
distributors have suppliers
from large companies like
Emerson, Cole Morgan,
Harper Hannaford,
Baldor, you name in.
So, if a customer needs a
standard motor, it ain't us.
A typical little motor goes
for a hundred and fifty bucks,
two hundred and fifty bucks,
our lowest-cost motor
goes for fifteen hundred.
The most expensive motor we've
ever sold actually a motor
assembly, a hundred and
eighty-two thousand dollars.
A lot of engineering
in that one.
This is just to give you a
flavor of what we've got here.
Space rated, abrasive materials,
more abrasive materials,
cold temperatures, hot
temperatures, cryogenics,
washdown applications.
Some of the people
behind all this,
that's me first Doctor
McRawlin used to be president
of Parker Hannifin
County Motor division.
He's still on our
Board of Directors,
we spun off from
Compu Motor in 1987.
It was a very friendly
relationship.
Doctor McRawlin went
on to be a buyer
of companies for
Parker Hannifin.
So, I have some access to people
who know about the business.
Dean Weinberg is a
technical project manager
at Jet Propulsion Labs.
So, we have access into the
NASA network when we need it.
Mr. Reality was our
first investor,
and is also a superior
type salesperson.
If you're looking for
the website, there it is.
It's also on the old
brochures that I passed around.
You may ask what does
special motors have to do
with this kind of stuff.
I tell you about
the linkage later,
but the reason I'm putting this
slide here now, if you notice
on the bottom of each slide,
it says Large Berkeley
National Labs
and the marking of
Rocket Center.
This photograph right here was
taken at the state rocket center
in Mias Russia, where we were
building this vertical axis
window, this is also
another vertical axis window.
This gets us into the,
the biomass thing.
I will expand on that later, but
that's why I have this notation
on the slides, and to be honest
I was too lazy to change it.
Automation and motion
control, by the way I was asked
to explain what the
job opportunities were
in this market place.
This is one of the fastest
growing industries in the world.
We're talking robotics,
we're talking all kinds
of miniaturization,
automation, you name it.
A distinction, we
do motion control,
you will find a whole other
area called power transmission.
Our transmission is about
pumps and fans and chains
and sprockets and belt
drives and things like that.
We don't use that much.
We're into precision to
a micron, you know, can,
can I move a robot arm,
can I point an antenna
on a satellite to
what, whatever.
Much more precision
type motion control.
Some of the jobs,
not all of them.
Applications engineers, every
distributor needs at least two
or three applications engineers.
I have, I don't know, fifteen
hundred different sales officers
around the country,
distributors.
They are all looking for
applications engineers,
in fact I belong
to the Association
of High-tech Distributors.
I'm going there next week,
and one of the topics is
where do we find
qualified people?
Now the part you are not
going to like, seventy percent
of the US economy is selling
something to somebody else.
This whole business is selling.
They may call you an
applications engineer,
but you're going to
have a sales hat.
You can be a sales engineer, you
can be a project manager, you,
but somehow, you're going to
interact with the customer,
and you're going to have a
role in selling something.
There are very few
positions back at the factory
where you design things, make
things, and nobody sees you.
Most of those factories
are offshore.
In addition to all of
the technical positions,
you got all of the normal
back-office things, accounting,
bookkeeping, invoicing,
you know, HR,
keeping up with the insurance
payments, and don't forget all
of the government forms.
They never stop.
As I said we have a national
and international
distribution network.
If you go to our website,
and you click on contact us,
up pops a map, you can click
on any country or any state,
and under that country or
state, you'll get a list
of our distributors
in that area.
I'm not claiming we
have the world covered,
I certainly don't have anybody
in Pakistan, or North Korea
or Iran, in fact, probably we'd
get in trouble if I was trying
to ship some of my stuff there.
Over the years, we have
had a number of interns,
and by the way yes, I do have a
couple of intern positions open,
this is what has
happened to these people
as their careers
have progressed.
Walter wound up working
at Lawrence Livermore National
Labs, he has designed equipment
for the National
Ignition Facility.
Mark went to work originally
for the GE Nuclear divisions
in San Jose, wound up being
a plant operator in Japan,
and now is working for Areva.
Andre went to work
for Daimler Chrysler,
and wound up in supply
chain management.
Sierra originally went
to work Hewlett-Packard,
moved to Lockheed Martin, was
at the Santa Maria facility
at Vandenberg, transfered
to Cape Canaveral,
was doing facilities support
for the Shuttle launches,
she can go as close to the
shuttle as it was possible,
unless you were an
astronaut, later moved up,
and she was running the
flight simulator department
for the F35 down in Fort Worth.
Martin Elliano is at China
Lake, I think he's working
for the US Navy doing
product development.
He calls me once in a
while for motor assistance.
Alex went on and got his
master's in Business,
and he is now partner
in a venture capital
firm out of London.
Ava was a student, who came
originally from Slovakia,
I should say Czechoslovakian.
While she was here at Sonoma
State, the country split
into Czech and Slovakia.
So, she had a problem,
she couldn't leave the USA
because there was no visa
project for Slovakia.
As a result of that, she
became quite an expert
in all the international
visa stuff,
and so she was processing all
the international students
coming into Sonoma
State, she later went on
and got her master's degree, and
now she's doing the same kind
of job for the London
University in London.
Jurg is working for one of
the largest banks in Europe,
he does technology
assessment on major projects
when they're considering
them for launch.
A few little things that
you might recognize,
some of you may know
of Flex Technology.
They were up here in Santa Rosa.
They make the color
changing ink.
They were originally Flex
then they got bought,
bought by JDS Uniface, and
now they are beyond ink.
The color changing Ink machines
are based on our motors,
without it they wouldn't be
able to make their product.
If you've heard of a
binocular telescope being built
at the University of
Arizona, a whole bunch
of our vacuum rated motors
all through that thing.
You may remember that the space
shuttle blew up on launch.
The reason was that the O-rings
on the space shuttle became
too hard, and were not sealing.
So shortly after that, I got
a call from Martin Thiokol,
and said we need to be
able to test the O-rings
on the space shuttle, while
it's sitting on the launch pad.
So we designed up something
called penetrometer.
It had to be able to measure
the durometer of O-ring,
it had to be safe, so it
couldn't blow-up, you know,
a whole bunch of
requirements, but we did it.
Another one, let's
see, this guy here.
The nuclear fuel
processing for the U.S. Navy.
submarines.
Now remember the hundred
and eighty-two thousand dollars
motor I was talking about,
well once you put the motor
into that facility,
it never comes out.
It's contaminated with
some really nasty stuff.
So they had to test it.
It took four years to
qualify that thing.
Now this is a neat little one.
During World War two,
the US Army build a large
number of chemical weapons.
They're all gone now,
but they had these things
in the stockpile, in the
arsenal there in Salt Lake City,
and I mean in the city.
One half of the thing
had solid rocket fuel,
and the other half had chemical
agent, and they were housed
in an aluminium structure.
Well the chemical agent would
eat through the aluminium,
and when it did, it would
attack the solid rocket fuel.
This thing will ignite,
and suddenly we have this thing
bouncing around inside a bunker
with thousands of other ones
just like it, spring, chemical,
nasty, really nasty
chemical stuff.
So, the Army said,
okay our solution is,
we're going to load all
this stuff on the trains,
we're going to ship to
the Port of Oakland,
we're going to send it
out the Johnston atoll,
and we're going to burn it.
And one of the senators
for California.
said, now let me get this
straight, you're going
to take these unstable
poison rocket, you're going
to ship them through my state
to a major city in California,
and if they happen to
go off, you're going
to kill a few million people?
No, you're not.
So, we got a call from Stone,
Stone Webster Engineering
from back east.
We need to do this, so we had
to make motors that would work
in this absolutely
amazing chemical goo
that would eat almost
everything,
and what they did is they
made a tank in a trailer,
drove this thing to the place,
and they would start loading
these munitions in there
and cutting them open, and our
motors were running the robot
arms and so forth to, to
get rid of this stuff.
NASA launches weather
balloons from the South Pole.
We have motors that are
on those weather balloons,
in addition to that
we have a number
of motors actually
installed down there
at the weather station.
One of the guys who used
to work in my company,
worked with the group out of
the University of Wisconsin
that maintains all this, and
he literally went down there,
and this was back before
Internet and so forth,
so I had an ISDN line, I was the
communication channel while he
was done at the South Pole
between him and his wife.
In the International
Space Station,
in the human habitation
areas, there are lab modules,
where they have all
these tests going on,
and there are fluid
control valves.
Every one of those
lab modules has one
of our little motor
gearbox assemblies
for the fluid control valve.
The calibration system for the
longwave x-ray telescope changer
uses one of our owners to
move the calibration source
across the face of
the simulators.
We built hydrofoils
flap controls.
We're talking huge ship
flying over the water,
forty miles an hour,
amazing amounts of torque.
This is kind of cute.
You think there might
be any safety issues
for [inaudible] hand grenades,
Woods Hole two thousand
meters deep in the oceans,
got that going, the
downhole well units,
I'll get into that some more.
This one, we got a call,
this was twenty years ago,
can you make a motor two hundred
and thirty degrees centigrade,
massive doses of radiation,
and oh by the way is
under liquid sodium.
We said well we can do the first
two, but not, not the last one.
They said, okay we'll build
an enclosure around it.
So, we did, we built your
assembly that handled all that,
wound up in the heart
of the fast breeder reactor
in [inaudible] Japan.
This slide, a marketing problem.
How do you take a picture
of a vacuum, think about it,
how do I advertise my
vacuum rated motors?
And we got urges to go visit
this is some piece of equipment
from a vacuum chamber, and
of course you get this there.
We've done on all kinds
of satellite programs,
in fact one of the
big markets opening
up right now is micro
satellites.
As a result of Space X, the
world has decided that the way
to handle communications and
all kinds of other things,
instead of putting up one
big, expensive satellite,
that let's put up a
couple hundred little ones.
If you lose two or three, well
you're still in operation,
by the way, because there's
quantity, let's make them cheap.
So, there's a lot of pressure to
bring the price down, you know,
we're, we're no longer doing
multimillion dollar projects
for NASA, you know, we're
doing thousand dollar motors,
and stuff like that.
We have done ground
supported testing of,
Hughes Aircraft was building
a military satellite,
which I didn't see.
We had to rotate and tumble
that satellite continuously
for seventy days, in a vacuum.
In order to keep the
motor from overheating,
we devised a mechanism to take
the vapor from liquid nitrogen
and pump it through the motor
and control the temperature
by how much flow we did.
So, we managed that.
We have several motors on
the space station, the,
when the shuttle used to
come up to the space station,
they had a docking ring.
Originally, the docking
ring didn't move,
later they made the docking ring
move about four to six inches,
and then there were these clamps
that locked the shuttle
in place.
My motors, my clamps.
We will get into beam
lines, observatories,
most of the observatories in
the country now have a vacuum
at that last couple of meters.
So, the air in the area
where you're working
doesn't distort the images.
So, we get a lot of
business on observatories,
US Naval Observatory,
we got promoted
on the super new telescope,
mount Keck, Lowell,
I can't even remember them all.
Lots of semiconductor
manufacturing,
the cleanest clean room is
a vacuum, there's no air
to make the particles float
around and get things dirty.
We also get into vacuum casting.
Imagine a thirty
thousand pound railcar,
full of hot metal rolling into
a place so they can pour it
into moulds in a vacuum,
so there's no air bubbles.
We're doing that too.
The International Space
Station, on the external part
of space station, there's
a device called CATS.
It was about a year
and half ago,
the wake shield lab
module was launched
and recovered three times.
So, we had momentum
controls on that.
I told you about Chandra, ready.
B-Sat two, that one was
interesting, our assembly had
to operate during launch, and
there was a real challenge,
because it had to be a certain
size, and a certain weight,
all, all kinds of things.
We did fair amount of
business out of NASA Goddard,
the Marshall Space
Flight Center,
the vacuum qualification system
down at the Marshall Space
Flight Center has our motor
in it where they're testing
to qualify other pieces
of equipment in the vacuum.
JPL recently purchased a motor
from us, for the gas sampler
that they intend to
send to Titan, the moon.
This lovely little picture,
that is a jet engine under test,
aboard the aircraft
carrier Kitty Hawk.
Our motors are controlling
the fill valves.
There's a whole system
there called Setty,
I forget leadership,
ninety, or a hundred
of these things,
something like that.
This is about the O
rings on space shuttle,
and this is just
a pretty picture.
Getting down to earth,
waterproof motors,
weatherproof motors, you
know the pipeline controls,
fish hatcheries,
food processing,
but it was over Modesto that
makes hot dogs on a stick.
Imagine you got to swing
that hot dog into place,
you got to take the stick, and
you got to poke it in there.
How many can you do per hour?
A whole lot of them.
Drug manufacturing, they have to
be washed down every four hours,
and sanitized and so forth.
If you've ever seen the water
show at Cirque Du Soleil,
this piano moves, that
motor moves that piano.
[ Inaudible speech ]
That's about ten inches in
diameter, and maybe a foot
and a half long,
something like that.
A little story on this one,
when they first got it,
got everything altogether
and they called us up
and said, "it doesn't move."
What?! It turned out that
they had the thing sitting
on the carpet, and the wheels
had indented into the carpet.
So, it was sitting down in
a little bit of a ditch,
and they couldn't get move, they
had to get rid of the carpet.
Navy submarines, the naval labs.
There's one in Maryland, there's
another one in Indianapolis.
We do various research ROVs.
Oil wells, this one's
interesting,
let's go down fifteen thousand
feet, it's only a hundred
and fifty degrees centigrade,
the cable round-trip
thirty thousand feet,
you can only have a
fourteen gauge wire,
because if it gets
any bigger than that,
we can't spool it up
and down the well.
Your unit can't be more than one
point three inches in diameter.
Can you give me two hundred
inch pounds of torque?
Oh, by the way, we're going to
set off explosives in the well.
I'm serious, when they
drill wells today,
they make a concrete casing
as they're drilling down.
After you get done drilling
to a point where they want,
they pull everything out
and they send sensors down,
and they determine where
the oil or gas is at.
They then put down in the well
the equivalent of Claymore mine,
is basically explosive with
ball bearings, and they locate
where they want, and they
set it off, bang, you know,
we get these back
every so often,
with all the teeth
blown out of gearboxes.
This is another one, the Swedish
Navy decided that they wanted
to go searching, at least
we were told, for mines,
and the idea was they had an
umbilical cable eight hundred
meters long on a destroyer,
and they have this little mini
submarine that swims around
and looks for the mines, so the
destroyer doesn't hit the mine.
Okay, but then they wanted
it to be able to point
to one thousandth of a degree.
And I'm going wait a minute,
this thing's out in the ocean,
floating around in the water,
moving like that, and you want
to point it to the thousandth
degree, are you crazy?
Nope, we'll pay for it.
Okay, you got it.
That one, is the
drill motorcycle
around the submarines,
they're using them
for basically doing mechanical
operations on the submarine.
This is the one that goes
into that god-awful mess
I was talking about.
It's actually a servo motor
resolver, a giant gearbox,
all special materials,
radiation hardened,
chemically resistant, and so on.
This is just to give
you an idea of what goes
on inside one of
these little guys.
You know, there's
no complexity to it.
The US Naval labs, this unit
goes into their test tanks there
in Maryland, five
thousand psi pressure,
this thing has actually come
back to us for a rebuild,
after being in operation
for fifteen years.
They're very happy with us.
Woods Hole, we identified
that one scripts water cannon,
the undersea warfare
Center totaling,
all of these guys
have waterproof stuff.
The vacuum casting thing
I was talking about,
there's the gearbox that
went on the railcars.
This one goes into a
beamline, and I'll get to that
in a minute, the drill motors
we've already talked about.
Radiation hardened motors,
well the nuclear industry
is pretty much shut down,
why would you want
radiation hardened motors?
You remember little place
called Three Mile Island?
How do you clean up the mess?
Radiation.
Oh, can you make more?
Yeah, we did that too.
Fukushima, Westinghouse came
and said "can we have some
waterproof radiation harden
motors real quick?"
But more importantly, Beamlines,
now most of you are going to go,
what the heck's a Beamline?
This is a beamline at
Stanford linear accelerator,
you see this long tube
here, that's a vacuum
and they're accelerating
particles down that tube.
There are facilities like
this around the world.
Some do neutrons, some do
protons, some do x-rays,
they all produce radiation.
If you look carefully, you'll
see motors here, motors there,
motors over here, then there's
motors all over this place,
because they have to
precisely position things,
they had be subjected to the
radiation because they're close
to the Beamline, some of
them are actually inside
where they want to both
vacuum and radiation.
That's a tough one.
Going back, some of the
beamlines we have worked on,
the National Ignition
Facility at Laurence Lab,
the advanced light
source at Berkeley Labs,
the Stanford Linear Accelerator,
ANSTO is the Australian group,
OPG, I can't remember what that
acronym stands for, it's one of,
one of those labs, the guys
in Australia have been using
our motors very extensively,
and they, like this one's
a break, and a motor,
and a gearbox, these are
special little resolvers,
they wanted these crazy
connectors on them,
we said the connector's bigger
than the resolver, okay.
This is just the table of all of
the different things that went
into the one facility
there in Australia.
You get a tally of how
many, and what they were.
Some of the people who are
looking for this combination
of radiation and waterproof.
GE San Jose we're doing
reactor inspections.
What's that at all about?
Well it turns out that almost
all of the reactors are built
with a double wall arrangement,
and there's this space
about that big, between
the two walls.
They figured out if they can
put ultrasound equipment down in
that little space, they can
look for cracks and crevices,
and all that sort of thing,
and they can recertify
the containment vessel.
If they can recertify
the containment vessel,
they don't have to spend four
hundred million dollars tearing
down the reactor, and they get
to make a few hundred million
more selling electricity
for a few more years.
So, when we told them, yes,
we can make this motor,
but it's going to
be really expensive,
they said we don't
care, just make it.
And there they are, right there.
Ontario Power Generation up
in Canada uses our motor,
Texas Utilities, by the way
Westinghouse you have probably
all heard that name.
Did you know that the
Westinghouse nuclear division
was sold to Toshiba?
And Toshiba went bankrupt
just a few months ago,
the whole Westinghouse
nuclear thing dismantled,
it's not there anymore.
I'm now getting calls
from Argentina.
We got one of these old
reactors bla bla bla,
can you give us anything?
So, it's interesting.
Temperature extremes,
generally speaking,
our motors on the high-end,
we're using a class
H insulation.
That means that the insulation
begins to soften at a hundred
and eighty degrees centigrade,
the motor itself typically has
about fifty degrees C rise
from the current flowing
through windings, so it
means an ambient temperature
of about a hundred and thirty
degrees before things start
to go bad.
As I said, we did
make a special motor
for the fast breeder
reactor, back when we did it,
it was like fifty grand.
I'm sure today would be
two hundred and fifty to,
to try and duplicate
it if we could.
Some of the vendors
that we used are gone.
On the low end, we have done
motors that run at four Kelvin,
and that's four degrees above
absolute zero, you don't want
to stick your fingers in there.
This little guy here, they
wanted to rotate a satellite,
they wanted to be
able to point it
with extremity positional
accuracy, all while it's
in a test chamber,
vacuum, and super cold.
So, what we came up with is
this thing's here on a hinge,
that's a magnetic coupler, and
there's a magnetic wheel here.
So, when it came together
you had a hard surface steel
to steel, no slip,
because the force
to return is thing
is next to nothing.
So, we were able to give them
the positional resolution
and accuracy they wanted,
all while it's super cold.
Now by the way, this picture
right here, nobody does that.
This is strictly for magazine,
you don't put your really
expensive equipment in an area
where it's going to
get loaded up with ice.
By the way, carbon
dioxide freezes too.
Sandia National Labs, this one
only went to twenty-four Kelvin.
Subaru Telescope, this I got
a call from the University
of Hawaii, Doctor
Brown, said can I get one
of your cryogenic motors?
I said sure.
Can I get it quick?
I said no.
I started to tell him you
know, about all the advantages
of our motor, he said I
know, I know, because right
across the hall from
me is the Subaru
and they put your motors
in, and it's working,
and the one I got
is not working.
So, I know that we're
having good luck
with Subaru indirectly.
Dustproof, we're into all kinds
of interesting things, saw dust,
paper dust, then you get
into things like flour mills.
Did you know that
flour is an explosive?
Oops, wrong button.
Abrasion resistance, one of the
early customer for our products,
was a place called ATrax
[phonetic spelling] ,
and what ATrax did was
made these Carbide birds,
you know these little tools
that you tool that you buy,
that has a spiral cut, birds,
made out silicon Carbide,
well they were using our motors
to make those burrs with.
Another company Corning glass.
They started out to make
something called fiber optic,
nobody knew what it
was at the time, we,
they started having all
kinds of motor failures.
And they found out when
they're making this fiber-optic,
that little bits of glass
floating all around the place
and getting into bearings
and tearing things up.
And we thought, well, you know,
our motors are failing now
for a month or so,
something's wrong.
And we went over there
and talked to them
and they said we are delighted,
the other motors only
last for three hours.
So, we eventually got it fixed
and the motors last a
whole lot longer now.
Explosion, in North America
there are two versions
of explosion proof, one is
what is well advertised,
known as explosionproof,
it comes with a certification
from UL labs.
The origin of explosionproof
motor is World War two,
fresh DC motor pumping gasoline
into the fighter planes.
They needed some way keep
the thing from blowing up.
A ref DC motor has arcing
this, the thing goes around.
So, the technique they came
up with his we make this big
heavy cast iron housing that's
got a whole bunch of
labyrinth ports in it,
and we know the volume, we know
what the material is that's
going to blow up.
So, we made strong enough
to withstand the
expected explosion,
and the mass is enough
to cool the gas,
so that the explosion doesn't
propagate outside of the vessel.
Explosionproof, not exactly
what most people think
of when they don't want
something to explode.
Now to get this UL
certification, I call UL,
and I say I'd like to
get my thing certified,
and they say okay
send me a check
for thirty thousand dollars.
It'll take about
a year and a half,
if you've done everything right,
we'll issue a certificate,
so you can go to negotiate
with insurance company
as to what your insurance
rates are,
so you can sell explosionproof
motors.
The alternative, national
electric code, section seventy,
subsection NFPA four ninety-six.
If you take a device,
and you pressurize it
with a known safe gas, you can
operate it in an explosive area.
This one has a much
older history,
you go back to the coal mines,
the early coal mines had
problems with things blowing up.
So, they learned that if they
took something and put it
in the vessel, and pumped clean,
dry air into it, it
wouldn't blow up.
That worked its way through
the guilds and then the trades,
and eventually wound
up under control
of the local fire marshals.
The National Fire Protection
Association is an association
of fire marshals.
They get a whopping
twenty-five bucks
for their pamphlet NFPA
496, and the fire marshal
in the local area where you at,
that inspects your equipment
gets a fee for the inspection.
That's it.
The Catch 22 on this is
it has to be installed
and certified locally.
There is no way I can issue a
piece of paper in California,
that says if you install this
in Chicago it's just fine, no.
You install it and
get the fire marshal
in Chicago to inspect it.
Talking about spray-painting
hand grenades, there it is.
Another one, I got a
call from Martin Thiokol,
and the guy says can you
arrange a motor that does this,
and he said we used to
have this amount of men,
what are you talking about?
And he says, we take,
and we pour the liquid market
propellant into these moulds,
then after the solidifies,
solidifies sorry,
we have to push it out.
We call it.
Now when we push it out,
if we push too fast,
the friction will ignite it,
if we push too slow it sticks,
and it fractures, and then
we have to redo it all.
There's a large hole
in the ground,
where our core popper
used to be,
they were using the hydraulic
systems first and they kind
of lost control, they came back
and said electrics
are much better.
We're getting to some custom
designs, this one was for NASA.
What they wanted was two
motors on the same centerline,
counter rotating where
they could put optics,
and they were going to run
a laser beam through it,
and make it a scanner.
The plan was to map a planet,
territorial mapping of a planet,
you know, looking at the
geometry of the surface.
This is a medical system, they
were using it for brain surgery.
And they had to sterilize
it, and the doctor had
to plug it in and all that.
The standard method of getting
linear motion is take a rotary
motor, hook into a lead
screw in a knot, and turn it,
so that it gives
you linear motion.
The advantage of this is
you get a lot of force,
you get the mechanical
advantage of the screw.
The disadvantage is it's slow.
This thing is called a
linear motor, the advantage
of it is it's very fast.
These things, when they're
moving are just a blur,
you can't see them, but they
don't have a lot of force.
Dr. Stadnik, that's kind
of like a rail gun, right.
A rail gun works on the
same principle right,
and Dr. Stadnik had designed a
way to get twice as much force
in the same physical package
as what's on the market today.
He's trying to build a
factory to make this happen.
Long story short, he started out
trying to do this back in 2008,
when the stock market tanked,
and everybody was
running for cover.
He wound up going to the Russian
government, convinced them
that they needed to invest in
their machine tool industry,
because they had done, so,
since ten years before the
Soviet Union collapsed, so,
kind of like fifty years behind
everybody else in the world.
It is now an official program
by the Russian government,
the minister of industry and
trade personally tracking it.
Systemin is a London listed
stock exchange company
that they're doing
the equity part of it,
the Russian soviet bank or
the sovereign bank is going
to take care of the
capital equipment.
Has anybody heard of
the word sanctions?
Might be a problem.
Okay, motors from scratch.
How many of you have any
clue how a motor works?
Anybody?
Okay, we've got two, all right.
The basics of a motor
are very simple.
Put in electricity, take out
mechanical power, and heat.
The limit of how
much you can put
through that device is how much
heat you can get out of it.
This is some computer
modeling, this particular one is
about the magnetics, you can
see this is Tesla's here.
This is an axial
gap motor design,
here is another axial
gapl motor.
You can go, okay, well
what is he talking about.
Most of the motors
that you're familiar
with are what we know
as Radial Gap motors.
You have a cylinder
within the cylinder.
This is the outer lamination,
the windings would go in here,
and you'd have a
rotor inside of that,
that's a typical Radial Gap
motor, and you're looking
at this and going why is
it all these little pieces?
Well there's something
called edi currents,
when you run a magnet
past a piece of metal,
you get edi currents
circulating.
If you don't make
all these lamination,
you get a lot more heat and
a whole lot less efficiency.
Now an Axial Gap motor
works in this arrangement,
where you have magnets
facing each other,
and the windings are in between.
So, you can see that the air
gap is in an axial plane,
as opposed to the rotary.
Here, we have lamination,
it's basically a strap,
you just wind it into a coil,
and this is a laser
cut piece here.
One of the problems
in the existing marketplace
is the laminations get punched
out of sheets of metal.
The bigger the motor, the
bigger the sheet of the metal.
The cost of the material
is going
up as a square of the radius.
The punching dias go up
as a square of the radius.
So bigger motors cost
a whole lot more,
and when they get really big
they cost a whole lot more.
Yes, we can use laser cutting
to avoid the punching dias,
if you're only making
a few units,
but it's not very efficient.
There is a problem also with
the bearings, I'll go to that,
if you're looking at
large diameter bearings,
I'm talking anything over
three feet in diameter,
they get crazy expensive because
this piece of steel here has
to be precision ground,
after it's been cast
and machined, and all of that.
There is another problem, these
little balls that are in here,
depending on the diameter
and the ratio of the diameter
of the little balls, that ball
is turning a whole lot faster
than the big ring.
Well eventually you
hit the point
where the ball either will
come flying flying apart
or starts a skid, it
is no longer rolling.
So, a typical big
motor, bearing like this,
top speed of about four hundred
rpm, something like that,
maybe even two hundred.
Another little clue, the
life decreases the square
of the feet, and the cube
of the load on the bearing.
Okay you may wonder how did all
of this special motor stuff
get involved with windmills.
We need an alternator
a windmill, right.
An alternator is nothing,
but a motor run backwards.
If I put mechanical energy,
I get electrical energy out.
I still get the heat problem.
This is the magnets on this hub
here and that's the winding.
This particular unit is a
vertical axis wind mill,
the general concept was mine.
This whole team here is at
the State Rocket Center.
The guy in the middle
is Doctor Bill Barker
from Lawrence Berkley Labs.
I wasn't there on
that particular day.
This whole thing is
a three kilowatt unit
at twenty-five meters,
twenty-five mile
an hour wind speed.
now, you may ask why
is, you see this,
that is the very first
submarine launched ICBM
that the Soviet Union ever
built, after they launched it,
they recovered it, and they
made it a monument here
at the Miyas facility.
This is some of the toys
the boys were playing with,
during this period
Al Qaeda was running
around with suitcases
full of money,
and Russian scientists
were selling their shoes
in order for something to eat.
Some of us decided this is not
a good situation, and so I wound
up being in charge of this
program, had a hundred
and ten PhDs at the
Russian Rocket Center,
designing those windmills, and
that's me standing right there.
These other gentlemen
right here, I can name all
of them, except that guy.
He's the man who took care
of all my security needs.
As far as I know Doctor
McClellan and myself are two
of four Americans that
were ever at this place.
It is not close, you can't go.
One of the things they
have here is a water pump.
It has both a horizontal
and vertical section,
and is about 2 meters
across tier.
When they want to pump
water, they call the Dam
and say start letting water
down because it takes two
megawatts to run the pump.
This is stress analysis of this
blade that was being tested.
We did initial tests
on the stainless steel
versions of Mark, okay.
I'm told that we're
getting on down on time.
There is another
type of motor known
as a synchronous
reluctance motor,
doesn't have a permanent magnet,
it's all wired in copper.
And reason it's important is
because NASA used this type
of technology to come
up with what is known
as the bearing-less motor.
There is literally no mechanical
bearing, it turns out that
if you take a normal motor,
when you energize it acts
like a solenoid, and so you got
a unattractive force this way,
you try to pull it out,
it doesn't want to come.
All you got to do
is figure out how
to keep it centered
and NASA did that.
Rob Jensen came up
with the patents on it,
and they decided they were using
it for flywheel energy storage.
And this is the prototype
for the bearing-less ring.
We also got into biomass,
and you go what does biomass
have to do with motion.
Well it turns out if you want
to take biomass and turn it
into methane, you would
like the little microbes
to be able to get up the mass.
If you can grind the
mass, chop the mass,
make it really small particles,
your process is faster.
This stuff here is Hydrilla,
it's an invasive
aquatic species,
it's clogging the waterways
of the American South.
Florida spends like four hundred
million dollars a year cutting
the stuff, trying to keep it
so the boats can get through.
This is a plan for a zero
emission power plant,
I won't get into
all that right now.
Our last thing is success,
you can have vision,
you can have skill, you
can plan, you can organize,
you can staff, you can work
hard, but if you're not
in the right place at the
right time, it doesn't happen.
And I can tell you
from experience
that when Russia invaded
the country of Georgia,
and our windmill project
went down the drain,
I didn't have anything
to do with that.
All right, questions.
Anybody.
>> You make a lot of
these motors yourself,
or all of them, right.
You must have quite
a machine facility.
>> Actually we, we
do the engineering,
materials specification,
final assembly, and test.
The actual manufacturing is all
done by larger motor companies
and we buy parts from them.
>> Okay. The other
question I have is,
a long time ago I worked on
red hot project in electronics,
what you do to make a
motor radiation resistant?
>> Materials.
>> It's all in the materials.
>> Particularly materials.
An example, don't use Teflon,
Teflon in a gamma radiation
releases a cloud of toxic gas,
and it's gone almost instantly.
You go to something like
a [inaudible speech]
and you get ten to the
ninth Rads before it's gone.
Nobody else?
>> Are you guys involved
in [inaudible speech]
with your processes designing?
>> Absolutely, mechanical
engineering is
about eighty percent
of what we do.
Almost always, the initial
selection of the motor is done
by a mechanical engineer who
said, can you make it fit here?
And we get into the specs and
how much to work on, what speed,
what accuracy, all of that.
The electrics generally are
later in the process, can we,
can we program it, can we
get the resolution we want,
do you have non-volatile
memory, is it absolute
or is it relative,
things like that.
Next.
>> Where are you
guys based out of?
>> Right here in Rohnert Park.
we are on Commerce Boulevard,
the address is on the brochure,
if you didn't get
one let me know.
Yes.
>> Why is the vacuum
target such a challenge?
>> Have you ever seen
one of these experiments
in high school, where they
take a beaker of water,
they put it under a bell
jar, and they pull a vacuum
and you watch the water
boil until it freezes?
Never saw that.
>> Afraid not, but I understand.
>> Okay. Well other
materials, outgassing depends
on what material you have used,
as what the outgassing rate is.
Now, you know, a piece of steel
does not outgas very much,
on the other hand
some of the adhesives
that you might commonly use
like Loctite or something,
goes away very quickly.
Okay?
>> So you have to deal
with that byproduct?
>> We have to choose all Of the
materials for the environment.
And we also have to
be able to verify
that we used those materials,
and that somehow we can convince
our customer we used the
right stuff.
NASA for example, issues a
document called O22A1124,
which is a list of all of the
materials have ever tested
for space and so forth,
and if you can show
that in their chart you have
chosen the material they say is
okay, then you're good.
Another issue you get into
on satellites for example,
is lubrication and mission life.
If you have vacuum grease,
and you have a mission life
of a couple of years,
you're probably good.
If you have a mission life of
fifteen years and you're headed
out for one of the outer
planets, not going to make it.
You got to go to
a dry film loop.
Anybody else?
Yes.
>> What kinds of
environments you have settled
at your facility for testing?
>> Actually very little,
most of the testing is done
by our customers, it's the
business decision on their part.
They don't want to pay
for me to do the testing,
so that I can sell the
product to somebody else.
They want to do the
testing at their facility,
so they can sell their
equipment for their system
and not have competition.
Go ahead.
>> Are most of your
final products sold
to the same people, like
pretty much custom design,
[inaudible speech]
>> Obviously we get
some repeat business,
for example the Australians,
Doctor Frank Darman heads
up that project, and he not
only does the beam lines
for Australia, but
he is also involved
in the European beam lines, and
he is recommending our products
for some of those
other facilities.
The vast majority of our
customers however are one off.
They got a contract, you know,
it's done, we'll call you
if we need you again next time.
Back there?
>> Can you talk about the
internship opportunity
for students?
The internship opportunity.
>> Okay, interns,
We have a couple
of different possibilities.
Right now, we are in the throes
of transferring our
computer integrate,
integrated manufacturing
software from one system
to another, that
requires that we take all
of the engineering data, then
put it into the new system,
restructuring, clean
it up, and so forth.
So, there is a case
where somebody
with some technical background
and willingness to work
on a computer, would
have something to do,
and when you get it all done,
you will have a pretty good
idea how we make our products.
Also, we are looking at some
engineering type talent,
probably mechanical,
because most of the stuff
that we do requires CAD work.
Enough?
>> Okay, it's now five thirty
four, [inaudible speech] Okay,
I'm sorry that I need to leave,
but if you like to have time
to ask more question
please do so,
I would like to thank
Mr Halstead
for his very interesting topic.
[ Applause ]
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