Attempts at making fully electric planes are usually small. The motors used to propel them can only generate a few hundred kilowatts of power at a time. Large aircraft demand larger output from the motors, so MIT engineers set out to develop a one-megawatt electric motor.To understand the difficulty in making a megawatt electric motor, one first needs to understand how an electric motor works.
. However, this also increases the heat generated during the process resulting in the addition of cooling elements to the setup.All these components add to the weight of the motor, making it more challenging to be used for aerial applications.The MIT engineers designed motor consists of a high-speed rotor lined with magnets of varying polarity orientations and a compact low-loss stator that fits inside the rotor but is filled with an intricate array of copper windings on the inside.