ORNL Launches Motor Decide Platform to Rank Electric Motor Tech by Supply Chain Risk

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have developed Motor Decide, a new platform built to help manufacturers evaluate electric motor technologies amid uncertain critical material supplies and pricing.

Rather than designing a motor from scratch, the system evaluates and ranks motor technologies based on performance, critical material availability, supply chain stability, technology maturity, and long-term resilience.

Because many electric motors rely on critical minerals such as copper and rare earth elements, Motor Decide combines what ORNL terms super intelligence (SI) with modeling and large-scale scenario analysis.

This approach allows researchers to simulate scenarios such as sharp copper price increases or the future commercial viability of newer technologies.

The platform outputs a ranked set of motor technology options complete with data on cost, performance, critical material usage, manufacturability, and long-term risk.

Motor Decide is designed to integrate with Motor AI, another ORNL-developed platform utilizing SI-assisted engineering tools to accelerate detailed motor design.

Once a company selects a preferred motor approach using Motor Decide, the results can be transferred into Motor AI to generate detailed design configurations and engineering specifications.

Lead researcher Praveen Kumar noted that many companies historically base technology decisions on market momentum or competitor activity, whereas this tool aims to quantify uncertainty and incorporate it directly into long-term, data-driven decision-making. Source: Oak Ridge National Laboratory