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.

What does automotive engineer do?

Ever wondered how any car comes about? Yes, it is right that no car falls off the sky, or grown from back yard, or printed from internet comments. They are designed and manufactured. These are the job of automotive engineer as well as manufacturing worker. Just to give the complete ecosystem of the grand scheme of thing, of course they are supported by the non-core generic group such as the procurement, HR, finance and well...managers. In this articles, we are going into what's been going on in, amongst others, the engineering design department to understand how's a daily life of automotive design engineer. Its about their daily grind, routine and what they are expected to deliver.

Firstly, for those who aspire to become one, how to get there? Well, any engineering degree will do. Car is an amalgamation of many things, covering electronics, mechanical, material engineering etc. I myself is an aeronautical engineering graduates, and I wasn't alienated by the items involved in engineering a car. Thus, get yourself a degree as an entry pass.

Vehicle Conception

Contrary to designation, or any imagination about the job, the design engineer job is quite a lot. The engineers involved in the design of the new car model, maintaining the current production car and continuously improving the running car. The first job is self explanatory. It is from the conception of car all the way down to the production, we'll elaborate later. The second scope is what is called maintaining the Bill Of Material (BOM) whenever there is new variant, or reacting to warranty issues, so there's a lot database updating, countermeasure trials and updating the design. The third one is the continuous stream of improvement, to make installation easier to reduce tact time, to cut further cost by optimizing materials and to improve customer satisfaction via achieving better operability. It's a lot job to do in 8 hours stint. Doing all these will involve a lot of meetings, vendor visit and stationing at the manufacturing plant. Many engineers only have quality time to do the design job after 5pm, i.e when most meeting has called it a day.

Now that you know roughly the overall scope, we'll dig deeper into the first scope from now onwards. The development starts when the new model has been conceived. Engineer's roles at this stage is in the vehicle packaging where each design engineer will conceive their parts like which component to use, how big is it etc....The preliminary design must comform to the target weight and cost, among others. At the end of this gateway, the styling must be freezed too.

Instance of packaging drawing

Side panel drawing

When the constraints are already fixed, it is time to jump into the detail design activity. Each engineer will start designing the parts within their areas of custodian. It means thousands of parts. This is where the components are assessed against their functionality, interference with surroundings, performance and manufacturability. For example, the side outer panel of the car will look like the drawing below. In addition to the child part drawing, there is also an assembly drawing, depicted by the tailgate assembly below.

Sample of tail gate assembly drawing

There are many factors considered in the design of any car component. Apart from fulfilling the function, the component also has to meet certain regulation too. For example, exterior parts has a minimum radius criteria, metal outer panel has minimum dent-resistance to prevent tone-chipping damage, the door handle has minimum operating cycle before breaking point and many more. There is also crash worthiness to think about, so that the passenger is safely cocooned in the body structure cell and the pedestrian is not injured by the over-stiff hood and front bumper. 

Nowadays, the design optimization is computer aided and thus, thousands of design permutation can be tried out rapidly. The modal and structural of stamped metal for example can be modelled with Altair OptiStruct to optimize design topology. The overall crash performance can be evaluated by LS-Dyna which can modelled the crash situation and the effect of welding and adhesive fixing structure can be seen too. For other components, Nastran is widely used too, and Abaqus will extensively used in the modeling of the component that involved bearing, contact surface and non-linearity effect. So the days to multiple prototyping is so yesteryear! More interesting facts about automotive design engineer 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.......

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.

Latest automotive engineering job

How many times you get frustrated when you get a not-so automotive engineering job when you specified so in the job search engine? Many of them are more towards machinery, automation and anything else except automotive engineering. However, site like Jobstreet has improved its search criteria. Where previously automotive engineering category is lumped together under mechanical engineering, you can select more detail to differentiate automotive from pure mechanical engineering, effective from some months ago. Anyway, below are some of the later automotive engineering job available in the market.

1. Logistic Engineer - Mercedes Benz - Responsible for process improvement, logistic and project implementation, new model/variant roll out, shop floor management and KPI tracking. For more detail head to http://www.jobstreet.com.my/jobs/2011/9/m/10/1439292.htm?fr=J
2. Assistant Manager Production Engineering - NAZA - Responsible for planning and managing budgetary, new model facilities preparation, coordinating engineering job and liaison with suppliers and vendors.

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.