E-Mobility Engineering | January/February 2024 21 H3X | Dossier From small beginnings H3X was founded by CEO Jason Sylvestre, chief technology officer Max Liben and president Eric Maciolek, who met at the University of WisconsinMadison (UW-Madison) via Formula SAE, where they were part of a university team designing, developing and manufacturing a small race car to compete in an annual sprint event against other universities around the world. In their second year, Liben and Sylvestre founded the electric race team at UW-Madison. “We learned that not all commerciallyavailable high-voltage [HV] powertrain subsystems are made equal – the inverters we had were scaled-up hobby ESCs with basically no protection circuitry, no active monitoring; they’d blow up left and right,” Liben recalls. “So, in 2018, we decided to build our own motors, inverters and in-wheel planetary gearboxes, alongside the battery pack that every team had to make every year, and we did it from scratch in less than a year to qualify for the 2018 season. We got fourth-place overall plus first-place in a design competition.” Post-graduation, Sylvestre successfully started his own power electronics consultancy and worked hands-on with silicon carbide (SiC) inverter designs. Maciolek worked on MW-class electric and hybrid powertrains, while Liben became a powertrain architecture and simulation engineer at Tesla. Before long, the three friends heard about ARPA-E’s ASCEND programme, which aimed to encourage industry and academia to develop power-dense, integrated motor drives for electric aviation – containing the aforementioned powertrain requirements for electrifying commercial aircraft. Although H3X had not yet been formed, the three men felt confident in their skills and experience to develop a solution that would meet these requirements. By late 2020, they incorporated H3X as a company and were accepted into the startup accelerator Y-Combinator, through which they gained significant learning resources and raised $4m to start developing their first prototype, which was completed in December 2021. Now based in Denver, Colorado, H3X has since focused on proving out its core technologies and ramping up battery and hydrogen fuel-cell systems. As such aircraft output nearly half of all aviation-related GHG emissions and will generate the most global growth in future passenger miles, decarbonising them will have the greatest impact on energy and emissions of any aircraft model. We have the technology Although ARPA-E in late 2019 declared such targets to be “beyond the capability of state-of-the-art technologies”, Colorado-based H3X has developed and engineered a portfolio of integrated motor drives that target ARPA-E’s published criteria for electrified aviation – currently achieving about 9.5 kW/kg, with further improvements expected to reach 12 kW/kg within the next year. Internal physics-based modelling by H3X has shown that, in some cases, the high-power density of its motors can more than double the range of electric narrow-body aircraft by freeing up considerable mass for adding batteries or fuel tanks. The company has created three product platforms to suit different power requirements, each consisting of a motor and inverter, and a gearbox where practical for torque output. In order of size, these are: the HPDM30, which weighs 4.1 kg and outputs 33 kW of continuous power; the HPDM250, weighing 18.7 kg (H3X is working to reduce this to 16.6 kg) and producing up to 200 kW continuously; and the still-in-development HPDM-1500, which is anticipated to weigh 130 kg and generate 1.5 MW continuously. The HPDM-1500 can be stacked – up to six units on a common shaft – to build up to a 9 MW system, weighing 780 kg. While these are the three motor platforms that H3X is currently focused on commercialising, the scalable core technologies it has developed can be used to create solutions optimised for aviation, marine, industrial and defense applications. The company’s smallest electric motor is the HPDM-30, which weighs 4.1 kg and outputs 33 kW
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