AK Steel, which is headquartered in West Chester, Ohio, recently announced that it has accepted an award of up to USD $1.8 million from the US Department of Energy (DOE) under the Advanced Manufacturing Office’s Next Generation Electric Machines (NGEM) program to develop the next generation of advanced, non-oriented electrical steels (NOES) for motors used in a wide variety of industrial and automotive applications.
The three-year project will be conducted in collaboration with the DOE, Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Power Electronics and Electric Machinery Research Center and Regal Beloit Corporation, a leading manufacturer of electric motors and motion control products. The objective of the project is to develop an innovative motor design with high-alloy NOES that will achieve an efficiency improvement of more than 30 percent when compared to existing motor designs with NOES products.