New wireless charging concept by British Columbia University

The researcher at the University of British Columbia (UBC) Physics department has come up with the novel wireless electric vehicle charging concept. Inspired by the method for magnetically driven charger for medical application such as the pacemaker, the concept has been extended to the electric vehicle charging, albeit still in the proof of concept stage.

The current state of the art wireless charger plays around with electromagnetic induction principle whereby the varying electric current in the transmitter resonates with the similarly varying current in the receiver creating the current flow recharging the battery. The drawback of such system is that is could radiate heat to the nearby metal or emit radio waves, both could raise the safety concern for the public, definitely won't be a help in mitigating the sceptism  about electric vehicle.

The UBC concept is wholy different in a sense that it utilizes a remote magnetic gears which relies on the magnet dynamic coupling whereby, even with the lack of contact, the two magnetic gears are rotated harmoniously simply by the interaction of the magnetic field between the two. Where the magnetic gear on the transmitter side is motorized, the rotated gear on the receiver side will drive the generator that produce the electricity to recharge the battery.

To demonstrate the concept, UBC researchers has build a trolley demonstrator which house the magnetic drive. As can be seen on the right the bottom bar on the your left is the transmitter which housed the rotating magnetic gear. When the magnetic gear rotate, due to magnetic interaction, the magnetic gear on the receiver side will turn too, generating electricity to power up the bulb at the back of this trolley.

For the field demonstrator, UBC has fitted such system to their service vehicles. Four wireless charger station has been build and the charging to their EV achieved 90% more efficient than the cable counterpart. They also found that the perfect alignment between the transmitter and receiver is not needed to achieve the desired virtual mechanical coupling.

While the system is still in its infancy, due to the immaturity of this technology, the potential can still be considered as high. Admittedly, to produce the system for mass application there is still a lot of refinement needed. First is the packaging. At the moment the magnetic gears are separated from the driven motor and the generator driven by mechanical gears, whereas for production these could be designed to be integrated. The material for the magnetic gears also is still lab-staged and a cheaper, easier to manufacture replacement need to be found.

The video demonstrating UBC wireless charger can be found after the jump.

Shortage of automotive engineer in Michigan - let's go there!

According to iTalent LLC in Troy, there's a shortage of automotive engineer in Michigan as there are more demand for automotive engineer than the number of people looking for job itself. It goes even to the level where "even their skills at the edge of automotive" they can get a job. The recent graduate can even earned USD120k a year, and there's an example of Tennessee-based recruit got USD17,000 annual salary increased and 20% more bonus to move to Michigan.

Chrysler alone is looking for 300 people. This is far cry from the situation in 2009 when GM and Chrysler was in trouble where the unemployment rate in Michigan was 14.2%.

How does this compared to Malaysian automotive engineer? I honestly think the automotive engineer in our country is poorly paid. If you are in the wrong company, even with 5 years of continuous employment, RM5,000 a month is a distance dream. There is also a question of standard of work quality. There's always a guy/girl in the company which does not know the wheelbase of the one (if not all) of the car his/her company is producing. It was like they sent out 5 million CV and when they were called in, they will ask their friend " Ni company yang buat kereta tu kan?".

Honestly it is a pity for them. This is after all quite an exclusive industry where the overflown of interest and passion definitely are making a lot of difference. It should be brought back to the 1985 era when a batch of pioneering engineer work on the national car project. It was a dream job back then. It was respectable even. My personal opinion is that, the reputation has been dragged down by the complacent senorita who keep killing the motivation of ever-fired young engineer with "change the world" attitude. Their passage towards making the Malaysian car more modern, higher quality, pleasantly operated and nicely assembled has been made extra difficult by people who prefer to be lazy, to prefer for the car parts to be self-assembled after a quick throw to the manufacturing line, who prefer to accept the inferior quality, who prefer not to exercise their engineering brain and instead choosing layman solution, who prefer to propose to reject countermeasure and the list goes on.

Anyway, I left automotive engineering world in 2007. Although I did make a comeback (albeit via oil and gas company, and doing spesifically powertrain alone), I still think this arena is still workable and enjoyable. It is just that sometimes passion is overule by financial.......

Vehicle engineering scene in Malaysia - Part I

There is a wide range of interest regarding this topic surround us, the vehicle engineering scene in Malaysia. University graduate talks about the job prospect, the Joe and Jane wonders if the Malaysia has the facilities to properly design the car, while the Mr Basher thinks Malaysian car are made of thin Milo, assembled by monkeys, tested by the corrupt and sold by the leech. Thus, the objective of this article is to offer an insight on the overall scenario throughout the chain of developing the vehicle, in context of what is available in Malaysia of course. It is not a small scale business, as the total development cost of the new car is more than RM500 million, and some specialized vehicle has even surpassed RM1b mark. This summation excludes the cost of setting up the vendors business and other support item, so the total value involved is even larger than this. In this first instalment of the 6 articles MMN is going to walk you through the high-level overview of stages in vehicle engineering, before breaking out into the details in the next 5 instalment.

Overview

Believe it or not, Malaysia has the complete sets of facility to grow the car from the clean sheet of paper. Typically, the definition of the car is derived from the conception stage, which outlines what car the company will build. This is firmed up based on market trend, cost analysis and of course the long range product planning strategy. Malaysia is blessed with some charismatic people like Syed Zainal, who led the development of Perodua Myvi and a host of new-age Proton cars like Persona, Saga, Exora and Preve which is really what the market wants. 

The next stage in the line is the vehicle feasibility study, where the packaging work (the location of man & machine within the car), cost analysis and preliminary engineering design are done. Somewhere around here, the team of stylist will work on the aesthetic of the car, religiously sticking their head to the screen of digital renderer and clay model. 

Once firm, the detail engineering work will take place, where the genius bunch of engineer will let their hair down in front of powerful workstation, scrolling the mouse endlessly to complete the 3D design (which is drawn based on the global best practise, supported by intensive benchmarking tear-down activity) while interactively exchanging design iterations with CAE people who is ensuring the strength, durability, air flow and noise level are well within the global vehicle design standard. These sections are costly, powered-up with a big computer servers running high-end software like Catia for 3D and 2D drafting, Nastran, ABAQUS and LS-DYNA to simulate the structural integrity and crash worthiness as well as Computational Fluid Dynamics software such as Star-CD and Ansys Fluent to study the aircond flow, heat dissipation, dust and water deposition, cooling efficiency and vehicle aerodynamics. Wind tunnel is involved too here, where parameters such as drag and lift force are measured, as well as engine cooling assessment where all are correlated back to the CFD models.

When the first-cut design stage is completed, the manufacturer will move towards the first physical stage,be it straight to intial production (or P0 as some termed it) or pared back to prototype level. This process is applicable to every single components in the car. It could be a simple door locking stub, or it could as well be the newly design engine. The rest of the stage will be the development where exhaustive routine of testing is performed, day in and day out. In-house testing covers accelerated weathering  and abusive loading, preliminary crash testing and many more. Early cars will also start to accumulate mileage outside the factories, giving us the blogger aplenty of chance to catch the first glimpse of the new car under development.

These are lengthy process where no less than two years are consumed. Almost parallel to the vehicle development is the factory preparation where the assembly line is prepared, long lead time tooling (such as stamping die) are ordered and so forth. So despite the lengthy gestation period, the working margin for anybody is small, as the procurement and fabrication of long lead time item need to be done early, imparting an early design freeze of major components.

Don't get freak out with all this complicated items. We will go through one by one, carefully examining the concept, the scene in Malaysia and what each stage means to us as the consumer. So stay tune.

Latest automotive engineering job opening

Fancy working in automotive engineering? There's no better place in the entire Malaysia to do that other than in Proton, where the complete R&D facilities (design, analysis, prototype, homologation and testing) are waiting for enthusiastic individual to join the force in catapulting Malaysia automotive engineering capability towards world standard. Jobstreet listed some recent posting by them which could spark the interest of young, innovative and motivated individual to get involved. Below are the position available as of today.

1. Design Engineer - Powertrain the sole remaining place in Malaysia to do powertrain, except at LEM, the only other place with this job scope (with people of F1 and racing experience no less than that) has been shutdown last April. They need people with 5 years of working experience ( with one complete project, really odd as they are the only one doing it here in Malaysia) and some CAD/CAE experience. Check out Jobstreet or email recruit@proton.com
2. Engineer- Research Energy and Mechanical - 2 years experience and knowledge in alternative energy source. Check out Jobstreet or email recruit@proton.com
3. Senior Executive - Engineering Planning 7 years of experience in engineering development and manufacturing industry and capable of harnessing the team strength. Head to Jobstreet or email recruit@proton.com
4. Engineer - Vehicle Cost Reduction if you ask me, I'll tell you this is a very interesting job as it involved a lot of innovation and you need to go through complete vehicle certification to get the cost-optimised part through mass production.