According to Frank Markus

Electric motors create a rotating magnetic field that pushes a permanent or electromagnet around and around. Electronics control the field’s strength and speed to vary output torque. For a traditional motor’s electromagnetic-field winding, rotor size, etc., it produces a certain peak torque that falls off above a certain speed. The new Chorus Meshcon motor’s “mesh-connected” winding is unique. Instead of a fixed three-phase design like your shop air-compressor uses, it’s wound in such a way that the inverter can treat it as though there are many more phases-say 12 or 18-and the software virtually “rewires” it on the fly changing the number of magnetic poles and the alternating-current frequency, so that at low speed it provides big DC-type torque, and at high speed it delivers AC-induction performance. The inverter control works like a virtual transmission, delivering big starting torque while efficiently providing strong cruising torque at all other times in a smaller, lighter, cheaper package that requires no transmission, cooling circuit, or precious rare-earth materials.

These characteristics make it ideally suited to serial hybrid cars like the Volt, employing a small combustion engine operating at peak efficiency to provide the energy for cruising and maybe using ultracapacitors to supply burst-torque energy. Chorus reckons that ditching the pricey plug-in battery and applying the cost savings of the Meshcon motor could produce a 50-mpg serial-hybrid that’s competitive with Camry and Accord on both performance and price.

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According to the company’s home page

The Chorus concept utilizes concentrated, high phase order windings which allows the beneficial use of harmonics (temporal, spatial, and overload). Rather than harmonics running against the main drive (creating heat), they run with the main drive, creating more power. Consequently, a Chorus machine can achieve much higher torque densities than a traditional 3-phase motor, but with no cost penalty.

Chorus Meshcon uses the software control of the high phase order windings to ‘rewire’ the Chorus motor on the fly. The motor automatically reconfigures to operate efficiently as a low-speed, high-torque system and as a high-speed low-torque system. The result is that a much smaller drive can be used for the same load, greatly reducing the cost of the resulting drive. At the same time, high speed operation is not hampered, so the same motor can be used to start a car engine, and efficiently produce electrical output.

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For even more, see Energybloggers.

According to Aaron Bianco at UltraCapacitors.org

So how can a Series Hybrid get much better mileage if it still uses an old-fashioned internal combustion engine to generate electricity? The answer lies in the difference between the *average* power draw of a vehicle, and the *burst* power requirement that is the standard for determining vehicle performance; and Chorus Meshcon shines in this ‘burst’ torque area by uniquely providing up to 10x the standard torque for that burst that would normally come from an overpowered ICE engine in a standard vehicle.