When Dyson realised that the third-party motors for its appliances were limiting the development of its products, it decided to design its own motor.

“Conventional motors are big and bulky, so we couldn’t make our machines physically smaller or lighter,” explains Mr Low Yee Cheok, the leader of the Singapore motors team in this project. “Such motors were also inefficient, consuming a disproportionate amount of energy when compared to the output they generated.”

The Dyson team of over 50 engineers from both the United Kingdom and Singapore took a decade to design and develop the Dyson Digital Motor (DDM). This motor now powers several of its appliances, including its popular handheld vacuum cleaner, the DC34.

Unlike conventional motors, the DDM is halved in size as Dyson’s engineers have reduced the motor’s rotors by 50 per cent, making the rotating assembly weigh less than 100 grams. This smaller motor also provides twice the suction power when compared to a normal motor. Spinning at 1666 revolutions per second, the DDM is actually faster than a Formula 1 engine. As a whole, the DDM weighs 1000 grams compared to 1300 grams for a typical vacuum motor, giving it an excellent power-to-weight ratio.

Another feature of the DDM is its use of a strong electromagnetic field to generate the motor’s rotation, doing away with the need for carbon brushes. In conventional motors, these brushes are needed to maintain permanent contact with a closed electrical circuit for a motor to run. DDM’s design makes it more reliable and cleaner because it does not emit carbon particles and there is no contact to its rotor.

This motor was first conceptualised by Dyson’s engineers in the UK. After testing that it works, the company opened its first research and development facility in Singapore in 2007 and recruited a team to take the DDM from prototype stage to mass manufacturing. “Dyson chose to set up in Singapore because of the bright minds here,” says Mr Low. “Our production in Singapore is also geared towards high-precision, fully automated lines, which suited the production of the DDM.”

The engineers from the UK and Singapore worked together for three years to figure out how to mass manufacture the DDM. The Singapore team helped to optimise the design of the motor, create the setup for its manufacturing, as well as test the product.

“One of the biggest challenges faced was to design a machine that requires such high level of accuracy,” says Mr Low. Moreover, while motor parts are usually made from metal, Dyson chose to use plastic. “This created a challenge in itself as it is difficult to produce a motor which has plastic parts that can be glued in less than 30 seconds — a target time we set,” he says. In the end, the team specially created robots that could accurately align and glue the parts together to overcome this issue.

Mr Low attributes his team’s ability to design solutions for the various challenges they faced to the vast experience they have gained working in Singapore. “Singapore is a global city with many multinational corporations,” he says. “This gave me opportunities to be exposed to a variety of cutting-edge engineering environments, and has served me well in my work for Dyson.”