SELMA, Sustainable Electrical Machines
Driving sustainability with electrical machines
SELMA stands for Sustainable Electrical Machines. It includes manufacturing, operation, and reuse/ recycling of electrical machines in a circular economy perspective for a sustainable future.
Vision: To establish a world-leading excellence cluster with a center in Sweden, in the development, industrialization, and adoption of sustainable electrical machine technologies. The vision is based on electrification, particularly the surge in demand for electrical machines in automotive, industry, renewables, and robotics, which is increasingly “mineral-intensive”. We want to address this issue by rethinking electrical machines manufacturing and design.
What do we plan to do?
SELMA goes beyond individual material and design innovations, adopting a circular economy perspective that encompasses the entire value chain, from mining to end-of-life (EoL) product recycling.
1) Part of our research focuses on designing novel materials to reduce dependency on critical and strategic raw materials. This includes developing materials for permanent magnets (REE-based and REE-free) and soft magnetic materials (electrical steel), as well as alternatives to electrical conductors, such as aluminum or specialized copper alloys, to reduce reliance on copper.
2) These material innovations will be integrated into advanced electric machine design. We will engineer innovative, sustainable machine architectures that minimize consumption of critical raw materials, creating REE-lean, REE-free, or completely permanent-magnet-free solutions.
3) At the same time, SELMA includes raw material recovery from ores, tailings, and the EoL electrical machine. By embedding design-for-disassembly principles, components can be collected, sorted, and either reused, refurbished, or recycled more efficiently at the end of their service life. In this way, recovered materials can re-enter the production cycle, for example, through the production of magnets or conductor alloys, thereby closing the loop.
Why is it important?
- Electrical machines (EM) are a backbone technology: almost all generated electricity and >50% of electricity consumed goes through electrical machines.
- Electrical machines enable a multiplicative effect: more efficient machines allow huge energy savings, smaller batteries, lower power electronic requirements, easier thermal constraints. The key to sustainability!
- Everyone is affected: industry, generation, e-mobility, robotics, data centre cooling, etc. No exceptions.
