From the San Gabriel Valley Radio Control League, South El Monte, California

If you’re like me, you sometimes use technology that you just don’t know that much about. Take electric motors—how do they work really? I knew it had to do with magnets and electromagnets, and something about brushes, but I hadn’t taken the time to figure out how they all worked together.

And now we have “brushless” motors—how do they work? So I did a little reading and have shamelessly cobbled together this primer from various Internet sources.

In a typical “brushed” DC motor, there are permanent magnets on the outside and a spinning armature on the inside. The permanent magnets are stationary, so they are called the stator. The armature rotates, so it is called the rotor. Clever, eh? Picture a big horseshoe magnet. Now take a big nail and drill through the middle cross-wise, and put a wire through the hole; now the nail can spin head-over-heels. Wrap some wire around it, and then attach it to a battery. You have an electromagnet right?

Now this particular arrangement isn’t that useful; the nail just sits there. Of course, if you were to reverse the current, it would flip around, right? And if you were really clever and fast, you could reverse the current again, just as the nail was flipping, and it would flip back. This is what the brushes in a brushed motor do. They make contact with terminals on the rotor (called the commutator) and as it spins, at just the right spot they break contact and reconnect on the other side, causing the electric field to reverse, spinning the motor around another half-turn (or one-third turn, since most electric motors have three coils for efficiency). The horseshoe magnet is your stator, the nail the rotor.

This setup works and is simple and cheap to manufacture, but it has limitations because of the need for the brushes to press against the commutator:

• It creates friction.
• At higher speeds, brushes have increasing difficulty in maintaining contact. They may bounce off the irregularities in the commutator surface, creating sparks. This limits the maximum speed of the machine.
• The current density per unit area of the brushes limits the output of the motor.
• The imperfect electric contact also causes electrical noise. Brushes eventually wear out and require replacement, and the commutator itself is subject to wear and maintenance.
• Having the electromagnet in the center of the motor makes it harder to cool.
So in comes the brushless DC motor. In this design, you put the permanent magnets on the rotor and you move the electromagnetic to the stator. Think about that. The electromagnets are on the stator—they are stationary. That’s a problem because now you need something even more clever than a commutator and brushes to flip the polarity of the current at the right moment. This very clever thing is the microcontroller in your ESC.

What it does is sense the position of the rotor (utilizing something called the EMF feedback through the main phase connections, which I have decided I don’t need to understand) to switch the field rapidly at just the right moment to pull the permanent magnets on the stator around at the RPM that you have requested. This system has all sorts of advantages:

• There is no sparking and much less electrical noise. A happy situation for our radios, particularly as the motors get bigger.
• There are no brushes to wear out.
• With the electromagnets on the stator, they are easier to cool.
• You can have a lot of electromagnets on the stator for more precise control.
• The timing of the pulses sent to the electromagnets on the stator can very precisely adjust the speed of the motor.

So that’s how it works. But one more thing: what’s an inrunner and what’s an outrunner?

An inrunner is a brushless motor with the permanent magnets rotating inside the electromagnets; in an outrunner this situation is reversed, with the permanent magnets on the casing of the motor and the windings of the electromagnets inside. Outrunner motors generally have some torque, but spin somewhat slower. This makes them better for spinning large propellers, which our airplanes need. Inrunner motors spin a lot faster but with less torque; this means that in order to get
the same torque, you have to put the inrunner in a gearbox, adding weight, complexity, and most importantly, cost. However, if you can afford it, this is the most efficient setup for any given size motor.

By the way, airplanes aren’t the only things that use brushless motors. Computer hard drives, CD drives, and hybrid cars are some of the other uses. It’s only a matter of time before someone takes the brushless motor out of a Prius and uses it in an airplane.