Hi,
I am part of a senior design team creating a solar powered boat from the ground up. We have been searching hard to find a motor that will work for our purposes, and for the power we need, the 48v motors seem to be the way we want to go (5kw for the endurance race and 2 - 5kw for the sprint). The problem, however, is that the competition rules specify that we must have not more than 36 volts for our source voltage (we plan to utilize 3 - 12 volt batteries). So we are wondering what sort of efficiency losses we might expect, and if there is a way to calculate this loss. For the endurance race, we only plan to use 1/2 of the 5kW power for maximum efficiency, but for the sprint we plan to use as much power as we can get out of the double motor set-up. Any help on determining what sort of losses might be seen by using 36v on a 48v motor would be greatly appreciated! Can we just control our amps to ensure we are getting peak efficiency out of the motor? Are there other consideration factors?
