The brush holder, namely carbon brush holder, acts as the core component for supporting the carbon brush and maintaining sliding electric contact in the motor with its brush. With rapid advancement of the material science, sensor technology and manufacturing process, that seemed "traditional" part is experiencing a silent technic revolution.
1. Smart Monitoring: from "regular on-site inspection" to "real-time precaution"
Owing to traditional brush holder maintenance that really depends on regularly man-power shut down for inspecting its wear degree of the carbon brush, presently, smart integrated-sensor brush holder is becoming one of the most important trend in the industrial motor.
Nowadays, the engineer has proven business solution in the world, such as i-BRUSH carbon brush motoring system, namely, there is an integrated sensor inside the carbon brush to continuously monitor the wear degree and operation parameters, and then, through cloud platform i-BRUSH Connect, to realize remote accessing, monitoring and trend analysis. Moreover, the latest IEEE study reveals that, with the on-line monitoring system of wear rate trend data, the rest service life of the carbon brush will be precisely predicted, leading to the mode that will be changed from "passive replacement" upgraded to "predicted maintenance".
2. New material: nanotechnology enhancement and composites
Owing to the traditional carbon brush that is designed with its main materials of natural graphite or electrographite, the space of its performances is limited. Therefore, presently, the material innovation mainly focuses on the following two aspects:
- Carbon nanoparticles reinforcement: the researcher introduced the carbon nanoparticles into metal-graphite composite matrix, through nanometer-scale effect, to improve its electric conductivity, reduce its friction coefficient and strengthen its wear performances. The research result revealed that, in the process of high-load operation, the wear rate of nano-composite carbon brush can be remarkably reduce than that of traditional graphite carbon brush.
- Lighter-weight-and-higher-strength composite material: The industry report has revealed that the manufacturer now is testing a kind of lighter-weight-and-higher-strength composite material to manufacture the brush holder itself with the requirement for reducing its weight itself in the condition of keeping its original durability, meeting the goal for the sustainable development.
