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.

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.

Proton CFE Engine - The Engineering Details

Note: Read first till the end before accusing a copy&paste from Lotus Mag.

Proton CFE engine has been introduced to the market at the very end of last year, under the hood of the facelifted Proton Exora MPV. The engine has been long rumoured, and has been long spied tested with the bigger-mouthed Exora for quite some times. Some called it Campro Turbo, while some referred it as Project Pheonix. Thanks to the publicity generated by the buzzy spyshots sites in Malaysia, the arrival of the CFE engine is very much eagerly awaited. 

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The Brief.

CFE. It means Charged Fuel Efficiency. The engine was born out of the necessity rather than the desire to soup up the Campro engine to rival the Lamborghini. It was back in 2009, when the Exora MPV was at its final validation stage. It became clear that the Achilles heel of the much lauded Proton's first MPV would be its powertrain, where even the CPS mechanism won't be enough to mask the lack of torque, long plagued the Campro family, and the unsuitability of small capacity NA gasoline to power such as weighty people carrier.

After a series of feasible study, Proton has concluded that it would develop a turbocharged variant of the Campro engine instead of buying-in a 2.0L NA gasoline engine. In terms of the combustion concept, it was decided pretty much from the beginning to stay away from the Gasoline Direct Injection (GDI) - although that such a trend at that time and a commoner today - to accommodate the low octane rating and fuel quality of Proton's export market and its home market itself. This is essential as it could raise some durability concerns should some problem occurs later.

The baseline target was to achieve horsepower output and fuel efficiency of the modern 2.0L at that time. However, with the heavy weight application in mind, the torque delivery must be substantial even at low engine rev, something only a turbocharged engine can deliver.  

The Design.

As the CFE is Campro based, there was a necessity to carry over the cylinder block, or else, Proton might as well make an all-new engine if the cylinder block needs to be totally redesigned. Hence an intensive round of Finite Element Analysis (FEA) and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) were performed to assess the limit of the Campro's block without compromising its stress-endurance and jeopardizing its coolant effectiveness. 

The results of the FEA and CFD indicated that the cylinder block could be retained with the improvement to the water jacket to sustain the higher heat duty of the forced-fed engine. Another changes required was the modification to the oil gallery to include the piston cooling jet. The stroke of the crank also has been shortened to 86mm , a 2mm reduction. This is because the height of Campro's block did not provide sufficient space to increase the piston crown strength with the size limitation to withstand the compression ratio which it self is boosted by charged air from the turbo. More and more juicy details after the jump.