Rare is it that a company completely scraps a design and re-engineers a component from scratch, but that’s what Kent, OH, U.S.-based Ametek Floorcare & Specialty Motors (www.ametekfsm.com) did with its recently launched line of 6.6-in. tangential bypass motors for commercial floor care appliances.

“We literally started with a clean sheet of paper to develop a higher-efficient design with a new fan system,” says Roger Smith, vice president of sales and marketing for Ametek. “We changed the location of the cooling fan, the carbon brush, and the commutators, placing them on the bottom since the cooling fan generates a lot of noise. Placing all of that on the bottom buries the noise a bit.”

The entire re-engineering process took about 18 months, start to finish, and resulted in new bypass motors with about 40% better efficiency. Smith says that the new design also improves upon the life of the motor, which previously was 1000 hours. “The new brush system is a curved brush so that we get more length of the carbon inside the same footprint. Because it is curved, we get more constant spring pressure. The new motor life is more than 1500 hours.”

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