Glass engines erase the drag that has throttled electric motors since edison
A motor core extruded from random-atom glass has wiped out the remagnetisation losses that have siphoned juice from every electric device since the 19th century. Engineers at Saarland University printed the first amorphous stators last month and measured energy waste close to zero; the figure has not budged for 140 years.
Ralf Busch’s team did not tweak copper windings or add rare-earth cobalt. They simply deleted the crystal. By fusing iron, cobalt and boron into a metallic glass that never forms grains, the Weiss domains – the tiny magnetic compass needles inside the iron – flip without friction. No lattice, no drag. The result is a core that stays cool at 20 kHz while feeding drones, appliances and, eventually, wheel motors that could outrun any Tesla plaid variant on half the current.
Why crystalline steel is suddenly obsolete
Conventional silicon steel is cheap, but every time the field reverses the domains tear past grain boundaries and bleed heat. Saarland’s alloys – Fe-Co-B-Si-Nb, Fe-Ni-P-B and Fe-Cr-Mo-C-B – lock atoms in a frozen chaos, so the boundaries simply do not exist. The lab clocked core losses at 0.09 W kg⁻¹, one thirtieth of the best grain-oriented steel. Translation: a 150 kW drive unit sheds 4 kW less heat, freeing engineers to shrink cooling circuits and push 7 % more torque through the same axle.
The trick is printing, not casting. Laser Powder Bed Fusion lays 30-micron layers, cooling each in milliseconds – too fast for crystals to nucleate. The machine then carves labyrinthine coolant channels inside the core, paths impossible to mill in laminated steel. Additive costs remain brutal: €480 per kg of powder today. Busch shrugs: “We paid the same for NdFeB magnets twenty years ago. Volume will crater the price.”
Europe’s quiet bid to own the next motor standard
The project sits inside the EU’s Amorphous Metal Additive Manufacturing for Soft Magnetics programme, a €7 million purse that keeps the IP on this side of the Pacific. Chinese labs have chased metallic glass motors for a decade, yet their cores still crystallise during sintering. Saarland’s parameter set – 1.8 m s⁻1 scan speed, 160 °C substrate, 0.6 J mm⁻³ energy density – is already filed at the EPO. Expect licensing deals, not open-source blueprints.
First customer: an unnamed Stuttgart Tier-1 that supplies hair-pin stators to European OEMs. Prototype delivery is slated for Q1 2025; road tests begin before the EU’s 2026 CO₂ fleet targets bite. If the part survives 1,000 hours at 180 °C, serial production follows at 50,000 units a year. Each motor would cut 12 kg of rare-earth content, a geopolitical dividend as Beijing tightens dysprosium exports.
Downstream, the math scales fast. Replace every industrial fan, compressor and conveyor rotor in Germany and you erase 2.3 TWh of waste heat annually – roughly the output of a lignite block. No new dams, no new reactors, just quieter factories and lighter EVs. The century-old war against copper losses ends not with a better alloy, but with a material that refuses to become one.