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AK Steel has received an award of up to $1.8 million from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop the next generation of advanced, non-oriented electrical steels for motors in a variety of industrial and automotive applications. The award was made under the DOE’s Next Generation Electric Machines program.

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 Corp., 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.

While DOE's NGEM program targets a vast array of industrial motors, pumps, and generators, hybrid electric vehicles represent the fastest growing market for NOES. Many of the motors used in H/EVs being sold in the U.S. today are imported from foreign suppliers, but a trend toward local sourcing and manufacturing is under way, AK Steel claims.