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ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:
Stainless steel for Cybertruck
Tata Steel innovations
Mixed-materials design tools
LIGHTWEIGHT METALS SPECIAL
Megacasting muscle!Tesla Model Y goes big on
aluminum castings with help from Italy’s
IDRA Group
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June 2020 autoengineering.sae.org
AUTOMOTIVE AUTOMOTIVE ENGINEERING
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ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:
Stainless steel for Cybertruck
Tata Steel innovations
Mixed-materials design tools
LIGHTWEIGHT METALS SPECIAL
Megacasting muscle!Tesla Model Y goes big on
aluminum castings with help from Italy’s
IDRA Group
June 2020 autoengineering.sae.org
AUTOMOTIVE AUTOMOTIVE ENGINEERING
®
AUTOMOTIVE ENGINEERING II June 2020
FEATURES12 Lightweight Metals Special
12 Tesla casts a new strategy for light-weight structures COVER STORY
The EV maker boldly invests in the world’s largest aluminum die-casting machine to manufacture entire rear underbody structures.
16 Steel the Real Deal MATERIALS
Steel’s infinite recyclability will help it remain the auto industry’s material of choice, insists Tata Steel Europe’s CCO.
19 Tesla’s Cybertruck is audaciously austenitic STAINLESS STEEL | MATERIALS A proprietary 301-series stainless steel gives Tesla’s first pickup truck unique sales attributes while saving tooling cost.
20 Lightweight design beyond CAD COMPUTATIONAL DESIGN
New computational tools enable an integrated data-fusion approach to complex, mixed-materials engineering. An expert from nTopology explains.
ON THE COVERTesla is moving to a single, large aluminum casting for the rear structural underbody of its Model Y high-volume sedan as well as future versions of Model 3. Enabling this new ‘megacasting’ is the world’s largest high-pressure die casting machine supplied by Italy-based IDRA Group, whose OL5500CS is shown. Tesla will eventually have two of these machines at its Fremont plant, plus one in Berlin and one in Shanghai. (Tesla and IDRA Group images)
16
REGULARS2 Editorial: Impressions of a rocket launch 4 SAE Standards News5 Supplier Eye6 What We’re Driving7 Technology Report
7 Can CHAdeMO 3.0 standardize global EV quick-charging? | ELECTRIFICATION
8 Cummins and Tula test ‘dynamic’ cylinder deactivation for diesels | PROPULSION
10 Customization drives new Porsche paint process | MANUFACTURING
22 Product BriefsSpotlight: Adhesives & Electronics
26 Companies Mentioned, Ad Index28 Q&A
Paul Platte discusses Covestro’s new polycarbonate solutions
CONTENTS
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Automotive Engineering®, June 2020, Volume 7, Number 5. Automotive Engineering (ISSN 2331-7639) is published in January/February, March, April, May, June, July/August, September, October, November/December by Tech Briefs Media Group, an SAE International Company ®, 261 Fifth Avenue, Suite 1901, New York, NY 10016 and printed in Mechanicsburg, PA. Copyright © 2020 SAE International. Annual print subscription for SAE members: first subscription, $15 included in dues; additional single copies, $30 each North America, $35 each overseas. Prices for nonmember subscriptions are $115 North America, $175 overseas. Periodicals postage paid at New York, and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Please send address changes to Automotive Engineering, P. O. Box 3525, Northbrook, IL 60062. SAE International is not responsible for the accuracy of information in the editorial, articles, and advertising sections of this publication. Readers should independently evaluate the accuracy of any statement in the editorial, articles, and advertising sections of this publication that are important to him/her and rely on his/her independent evaluation. For permission to reproduce or use content in other media, contact [email protected]. To purchase reprints, contact [email protected]. Claims for missing issues of the magazine must be submitted within a six-month time frame of the claimed issue’s publication date. The Automotive Engineering title is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Full issues and feature articles are included in the SAE Digital Library. For additional information, free demos are available at www.saedigitallibrary.org.(ISSN 2331-7639 print)(ISSN 2331-7647 digital)
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EDITORIAL Bill VisnicEditorial [email protected]
Lindsay [email protected]
Paul SeredynskiSenior [email protected]
Ryan GehmAssociate [email protected]
Jennifer ShuttleworthAssociate [email protected]
Lisa ArrigoCustom Electronic Products [email protected]
ContributorsKami BuchholzDetroit Editor
Stuart BirchEuropean Editor
Terry CostlowElectronic Technologies Editor
Bradley BermanU.S. West Coast Editor
Sebastian Blanco, Don Sherman, Paul Weissler
DESIGNLois ErlacherCreative Director
Ray CarlsonAssociate Art Director
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InternationalEurope – Central & Eastern:Sven AnackerBritta [email protected]@intermediapartners.de
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REPRINTSJill [email protected]
AUTOMOTIVE ENGINEERING 2 June 2020
EDITORIALImpressions of a rocket launch For a brief but illuminating moment, advanced engineering at its finest was on the world stage. The May 30, 2020, launch from Cape Canaveral of two American astronauts, destined for the orbiting International Space Station (ISS), marked the first time since 2011 that the U.S. put humans into space from home soil.
The reawakening of the U.S. space program is invigorating to those who understand the value of technical achievement on a grand scale—and who simply love seeing giant rockets blast off into the sky. And its joint public-private partnership of NASA and SpaceX is historic. The iconic government agency provided funding, its hall-mark safety oversight and crew for the recent Demo-2 spaceflight. SpaceX, founded in 2002 by a pre-Tesla Elon Musk, supplied the mission’s Crew Dragon capsule and reusable Falcon-9 rocket.
The Falcon unleashes nearly 23,000 kN (5,130,000 lbf) of thrust at sea-level liftoff, courtesy of its 27 Merlin 1D en-gines. A 1,500-horsepower Bugatti Chiron is a wimp by comparison. And while NASA’s mighty Saturn V boosters (each worth $110 million in 1971) were deemed unrecoverable after each Apollo launch, SpaceX is getting quite adept at executing near-bullseye recov-eries for Falcon-9’s first stage, on a drone platform off the Florida coast minutes after liftoff.
Aero engineers maintain that landing first-stage boosters is a choice. Most of the initial fuel burn has the purpose of lifting the fuel itself, plus the 10% addi-tional mass of the upper stage(s). Therefore, holding some fuel in reserve for lowering that stage to earth, versus the options of parachuting it into the sea or simply building a replacement, is a cost-accounting matter. Still, the te-lemetry alone is tremendously cool—
and SpaceX pioneered it.The Demo-2 journey validated the
Crew Dragon/Falcon 9 combination, with more to come. SpaceX holds a $2.6-billion contract with NASA’s Commercial Crew Program to fly six operational crewed missions to the ISS.
Significantly, the capsule, booster systems and the Merlin engine family were all designed and developed by the California-based aerospace company. Its record of 85 launches, 46 landings and 31 reflown rockets, and its success-ful commercial-payload business, have
proved SpaceX’s credibility to even the most skeptical among NASA’s slide-rule-era retirees. The company also earns praise for its cost efficiency. As an avia-tion analyst remarked, “You won’t find $500 screwdriv-ers at Hawthorne.”
The Demo-2 mission gen-erated enormous positive publicity for Elon Musk, in-
cluding the canny use of two Model X Teslas (wearing large NASA logos) to transport the astronauts to the launch pad. For the tech-savvy viewer/EV cus-tomer, the May 30 space mission af-firmed Musk as a mobility visionary, even down to the large flat-panel array envel-oping the Crew Dragon cockpit—“very Tesla-like,” a friend observed.
No matter what opinion you have of Musk, it’s no surprise that his compa-nies are magnets for young engineering and technical talent. SpaceX and Tesla are considered demanding and presti-gious career builders.
I believe that Musk’s heart is more into SpaceX than it is in Tesla. His suc-cess as an EV maker isn’t close to matching what his aerospace enterprise has achieved in 12 short years. But prof-itably making affordable electric cars at consistently high quality and volume is in many ways the more difficult endeav-or. Perhaps Elon would agree.
Lindsay Brooke, Editor-in-Chief
It’s no surprise that Musk’s companies are magnets for young engineering talent.
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AUTOMOTIVE ENGINEERING 4 June 2020
SAE STANDARDS NEWS
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Jennifer ShuttleworthAssociate EditorJennifer.Shuttleworth @sae.org
New Cooperative Driving Automation standard provides clarity to support advancement of full automation
In May, amid quarantine and lockdowns for the Coronavirus pandemic, SAE International pub-lished SAE J3216 Standard: Taxonomy and Definitions for Terms Related to Cooperative
Driving Automation for On-Road Motor Vehicles (https://www.sae.org/standards/content/j3216_202005/). The new standard provides clarity to support advancement of full automation.
SAE J3216 builds on 2016’s SAE J3016 that defines six levels of driving automation, from SAE Level Zero (no automation) to SAE Level 5 (full vehicle autonomy). While J3016 aims to provide clarity and offer a foundation for ad-vancing vehicle automation technologies, the newly-published J3216 does so with terms, defi-nitions and taxonomy focused on Cooperative Driving Automation (CDA), a key building block that supports all levels of automation.
CDA sits at the intersection of two important transportation technologies: automation and connectivity, said Shawn Kimmel, vice-chair of the SAE International On-Road Automated Driving (ORAD) Committee and the document sponsor. It helps enable benefits, such as coop-erative intersection and traffic management applications that reduce travel times and/or improve road operations by coordinating the movement of multiple vehicles in proximity. “The development of a common language helps enable discussions between automobile manufacturers, technology companies and in-frastructure stakeholders to work together to achieve industry goals,” he noted.
J3216 describes machine-to-machine (M2M) communication to enable cooperation between vehicles with driving automation features en-
gaged, other road users and infrastructure such as traffic signals and work zones. The coopera-tion supports or enables performance of the Dynamic Driving Task (DDT). It is defined as four classes, A through D, based on increasing amount of cooperation entailed in each succes-sive class:• Status-sharing,• Intent-sharing,• Agreement-seeking, and• Prescriptive.
Ultimately, cooperation among multiple partici-pants and perspectives in traffic help improve safe-ty, mobility, situational awareness and operations.
“As an industry convener, SAE is uniquely po-sitioned to bring together industry and infra-structure to create an agreed-upon language through which CDA can safely evolve,” said Keith Wilson, technical program manager at SAE International. As the need for CDA increases with the realization of all levels of automation, the J3216 standard has considerable potential impacts on traffic, operations, and safety for automated mobility.
The J3216 document focuses on application-oriented functionality. It does not imply the need for or require any specific functionality associated with communications protocols or the open systems interconnection model layers in a protocol stack. It addresses the operational and tactical timescales of dynamic driving on ADS-operated vehicles, and excludes strategic functions such as trip scheduling and selection of destinations and waypoints.
This information report is intended to facilitate communication and awareness for the design, development and validation of cooperative driv-ing automation.
J3216’s publication was accomplished in under one year. “That’s a land-speed record for stan-dards development!” Kimmel said in an article he published on LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com/pulse/saes-new-cooperative-driving-automation-stan-dard-shawn-kimmel-ph-d-/).
As technology moves quicker, standards devel-opment will need to keep up. J3216 demonstrates how SAE’s accelerated standards development process and partnerships with U.S. DoT are help-ing the standards sector evolve, Kimmel shared.
For more information on SAE J3216 Standard, see www.sae.org/standards/content/j3216_202005/.
Developed in less than one year, SAE’s new J3216 standard has positive impacts on traffic, operations and safety for automated mobility.
AUTOMOTIVE ENGINEERING June 2020 5
SUPPLIER EYE
Michael RobinetExecutive DirectorIHS Markitmichael.robinet @ihsmarkit.com
Now comes product-cadence chaos
Thus far, 2020 has taught the auto indus-try several valuable – and in many ways, brutal – lessons. The coronavirus pan-demic opened our eyes to the industry’s
interdependence and underlying fragility.In last month’s column, I discussed the impact
COVID-19 is having on R&D budgets. A reduction in available future capital adversely impacts OEM and suppliers alike – forcing a focus on only those initiatives that fit into increasingly restrictive bud-gets. Risk reduction and optimizing revenue now are at the forefront for organizations of all sizes.
Adjusting R&D budgets is only the beginning of the cost paring. In IHS Markit’s early evaluation of the pandemic, we warned the industry that future product and capacity investments would be under intense scrutiny. The auto companies learned in 2009 that if purchase orders were already cut and tooling builds had commenced, then stopping the process was futile and cost prohibitive. Essentially, the horse had already left the barn.
Bolstering the balance sheet through invest-ment reductions is paramount as product and capacity investments take on a couple of forms when the impact of the shutdown is concerned. First is a raft of product-launch delays of up to three months expected over the next year. The most recent IHS Markit North American Light Vehicle Production Forecast outlines a launch count decline of 28% in 2020 (versus pre-pan-demic) with several key, late-year launches slip-ping into 2021. (A ‘launch’ is the combination of a nameplate and plant for an all-new design or major revision). But the more significant deci-sions are longer-term.
If production tooling is not cut nor designs finalized, OEMs have options. They can delay, rescope or cancel future product programs. The latest forecast underscores a launch count de-cline of 17% vs. pre-pandemic for 2023 for the traditional Detroit Three OEMs. In a crisis, one’s focus becomes sharper as nice-to-have/optional programs are quickly shelved for those with quantifiable returns and less enterprise risk.
This product-cadence chaos has multiple downstream effects. Suppliers targeting key plat-forms as entry points for new product and pro-cess technologies may have to wait. These delays have a trickle-down effect to alter the payback period for such investments. They’ll likely nega-tively alter the dynamics of the business case.
Beyond the inefficiencies caused by the new vehicles not reaching the market when antici-pated, suppliers also face a lack of margin replen-ishment. Sourcing for new programs usually al-lows suppliers to integrate technology with high-er client value and possibly increased production efficiency — both bolstering the bottom line. Without margin replenishment, existing programs that have experienced several years of customer-driven cost-downs will now experience more. Suffice to say if a system has been in production for five years, odds are a supplier will not devote more capital to increasing operational efficiency for a couple extra unplanned years, thus forcing gross margins to further decline.
Of course, there is a flipside to consider. OEMs and suppliers alike with strong balance sheets and a longer perspective use these ex-traordinary events to rapidly regroup and be
opportunistic. There is op-portunity to solidify market positions, expand into new sectors or make transforma-tional changes to the orga-nization — positioning for future success. This ability to leapfrog the competition redefines the competitive marketplace.
As the global lockdown ends and business resumes, the automotive ecosystem will experience significant shifts. A focus on de-risking the enterprise, seeking dif-ferentiation and capacity consolidation will be front and center.
If production tooling is not cut nor designs finalized, OEMs have options—including canceling future programs.
AUTOMOTIVE ENGINEERING 6 June 2020
WHAT WE’RE DRIVING
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“Grab your helmet, you need to ride this thing!” exclaimed my pal Dave, as he parked his new electric Harley-Davidson in my driveway. Hadn’t heard him com-ing, not even tire noise. The LiveWire is the silent hog.
I’ve been motorcycle-obsessed since childhood and currently own two hy-drocarbon-fueled parallel twins, which won’t accelerate to 60 mph in 3 sec-onds like the LiveWire is capable of do-ing. Nor do they sport an easy-to-use 4.3-inch (109-mm) color TFT touch-screen or offer Level 3 DC fast charging, along with L1 and L2. Pop the cover on the top of the LiveWire’s faux gas tank and there’s a CCS charge port. Neat.
But, being the eternal codger, I still love the sound and feel of a combustion-en-gined machine. Harley’s EV team realized most riders who can afford a $30,000 e-hog do, too. Using the motor magnets and software, the engineers added a tac-tile vibration into the LiveWire’s driveline. You feel the subtle shakes through the pegs and handlebar. It’s counter to the automotive EV-development ethos, but I get why it’s done for a Harley.
Dave alerted me to the bike’s roughly 140-mile (225-km) range, of which about 90 miles (145 km) remained. So, my LiveWire ride was a 20-mile (32-km) scoot on my local country road. Impressions: it’s quick, quiet and doesn’t feel like it weighs 550 lb. (249 kg). Most of that mass is the liquid-cooled 15.5-kWh battery and traction motor. Ride quality is between firm and ElectraGlide plush. There’s no discern-ible heat emitted from the powertrain. But I greatly missed the clutching and gearchanging that make piston-pow-ered motorcycling so enjoyable.
Lindsay Brooke
Four regular-sized adults onboard, I’m estimating 575 lbs (261 kg). A steep but abrupt grade of maybe 1.5 miles. One-third of the way up, a passing lane is available and there’s our chance to get past a dawdler. Pin the 2020 Honda CR-V Hybrid’s accelerator and from somewhere centered ahead of the firewall comes a raucous grumble-blare not all that different from open-ing up a big outboard motor. The sheer volume and tortured tenor cause ev-eryone in the cabin to look at one an-other: “What the hell?”
The CR-V Hybrid’s “two-motor” sys-tem (already used to good effect in the Accord) is comprised of an AC syn-chronous motor dedicated to propul-sion and geared in tandem with the 2.0-L 4-cylinder, both clutched to the differential. Another AC motor-genera-tor is geared directly with the differen-tial and largely charges the small 1.4-kWh lithium-ion battery. The setup is meant to bias the propulsion job to the 181-hp propulsion motor, with the en-gine providing electricity to the trac-tion motor and the battery pack — or directly inputting to the differential at a single fixed ratio only in times of great need. Like steep uphill passing with four aboard.
The 2020 CR-V Hybrid is cleverly packaged and provides an undeniable efficiency proposition (40 mpg city/35 mpg highway). For suburbanites and flat-landers, it’s probably the choice over the conventional CR-V. For those with elevation or an acceleration fetish, it may not be the horse for those courses.
Bill Visnic
Body-on-frame luxury SUVs are a curi-ous thing. It’s difficult to imagine a cus-tomer in the market for an SUV that ap-proaches a six-figure price also desiring the burly characteristics that come with actual off-road ability. Sure, there might be a few monied soccer parents who are convinced the 2020 Infiniti QX80 is nec-essary to ford the six inches of water in the half-frozen creek to their getaway cabin. But I think those who buy truck-based luxury SUVs are pretty much buy-ing size — and badge.
Then comes the awakening. Like many of its ilk, the QX80 is big on the outside but not terribly roomy inside. There’s plenty of room for the front oc-cupants and certainly in the second-row captain’s chairs, but its third row is the usual cruel joke and now you’re looking at an over-large vehicle that’s spacious — for four. Any more people and you’re inexplicably squeezing into this 3-ton truckster that sports a 10-foot (3048-mm) wheelbase. Whaaat?
The QX80 has an honest 5.6-L V8, though, which these days is something of a luxury. It’s got 400 hp and 413 lb-ft (560 Nm) and lets you know it with a loutish roar at every startup; in a close-quartered garage, it borders on obnox-ious. Urgent acceleration elicits the same intake boom and only average accelera-tion results. However, the QX80 breezily holds 90-mph interstate cruises that come with precious little wind or road noise in the brilliantly isolated cabin.
There’s a 9.2 inches of ground clear-ance and a genuine transfer-case differ-ential, so the QX80 does have ostensible off-road chops. But maybe the appear-ance of those virtues would be enough?
Bill Visnic
2020 Harley-Davidson LiveWire ELW
2020 Honda CR-V Hybrid
2020 Infiniti QX80
TECHNOLOGY REPORT
AUTOMOTIVE ENGINEERING June 2020 7
SAE INTERNATIONAL BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Todd ZarfosPresident
Paul Mascarenas, OBE2019 President
Jeff Hemphill2021 President Elect
Pascal JolyVice President – Aerospace
Ken Washington, PhDVice President – Automotive
Michael WeinertVice President – Commercial Vehicle
Andrew JeffersTreasurer
David L. Schutt, PhDChief Executive Officer
Gregory L. Bradley, Esq.Secretary
Landon Sproull
Jeff Varick
Rhonda Walthall
SAE International SectionsSAE International Sections are local units comprised of 100 or more SAE International Members in a defined technical or geographic area. The purpose of local Sections is to meet the technical, developmental, and personal needs of the SAE Members in a given area. For more information, please visit sae.org/sections or contact SAE Member Relations Specialist Abby Hartman at [email protected].
SAE International Collegiate ChaptersCollegiate Chapters are a way for SAE International Student Members to get together on their campus and develop skills in a student-run and -elected environment. Student Members are vital to the continued success and future of SAE. While your course work teaches you the engineering knowledge you need, participation in your SAE Collegiate Chapter can develop or enhance other important skills, including leadership, time management, project management, communications, organization, planning, delegation, budgeting, and finance. For more information, please visit students.sae.org/chapters/collegiate/ or contact SAE Member Relations Specialist Abby Hartman at [email protected]
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Can CHAdeMO 3.0 standardize global EV quick-charging?On April 24, the CHAdeMO Association released the 3.0 version of its electric-vehicle (EV) charg-ing protocol. The technology was co-developed by the China Electricity Council as a 600-amp, 900-kW, bi-directional DC quick-charging stan-dard that is harmonized and backward-compati-ble with all existing standards for the world’s EVs. CHAdeMO was formed in 2010 by five ma-jor Japanese automakers and the Tokyo Electric Power Co. It has grown into a global association with more than 400 members.
The project to create an updated quick-charger standard was dubbed ChaoJi – the moniker that would also be used for a new harmonized global DC standard. The project commenced in early 2018 when representa-tives from China, home to the world’s largest EV market, proposed that CHAdeMO help make improvements to China’s GB/T standard. The Chinese National Committee of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) are designated as Guobiao or “GB/T standards.”
An early goal was to increase the mechanical strength of the coupler but reduce its size. In monthly meetings held throughout late 2018 and 2019, CHAdeMO and CEC expanded the goals for the new standard. Those discussions culminated in a gathering of international EV charging ex-perts in Tokyo for the 1st International ChaoJi Technical Workshop in July 2019.
900 kW beyond heavy-duty vehiclesCHAdeMO had long planned to upgrade its ex-isting 400-kW protocol to the 3.0 version, which would enable a whopping 900 kW of power – with a peak of 600 amps and 1,500 volts – for heavy-duty vehicles, such as trucks and buses. But the association expanded protocols for that level of power to a wide range of vehicles, as well as charging at homes and workplaces in ad-dition to highway locations.
Tomoko Blech, the European secretary-gener-al of the CHAdeMO Association, in an email to SAE’s Automotive Engineering, explained, “The first vehicle using ChaoJi is expected as early as the end of 2021.” She wrote that the increased capacity of the CHAdeMO 3.0 could be achieved at a reduced cost due to the larger scale of the Chinese EV market.
Blech wrote, “Harmonizing with China’s GB/T is one way to achieve these cost reductions by
the economy of scale. China accounts for almost 80 percent of all fast chargers in the world.”
CEC members performed the early-stage design work and prototyping. The Chinese and Japanese teams then mutually ensured that the new joint ChaoJi standard would be back-ward compatible with existing CHAdeMO and GB/T versions.
Test criteria due in 2021 In her email, Blech claimed that “Huge efforts were made to harmonize the hardware, software, and safety requirements of CHAdeMO 3.0 as much as possible with the latest versions of the relevant IEC, ISO, and SAE standards.” Based on successful trials of 500-amp, 475-kW charging in China, charging could fully replenish a 250-mile (402-km) EV battery in about 10 minutes.
Project leaders claim that if automakers uti-lize an 800-volt onboard battery system, twice as much range could be added in the same time. The first demo events and trails – using liquid-cooled connectors and a max current of 600 amps – were conducted at UL Japan Kashima EMC testing laboratory in Chiba pre-fecture, Japan, on February 6, 2020. The test-ing criteria for CHAdeMO 3.0 certification, cur-rently being written, will be released in 2021. In the U.S., CHAdeMO has accreditation as a stan-dard managed by IEEE.
Adaptors will likely be produced and sold for Tesla and CCS-compatible vehicles to use CHAdeMO 3.0 chargers. But those would emerge from third-party providers, not as
Prototype of CHAdeMo’s redesigned, smaller and lighter 3.0 charge connector shows detail of the production unit.
AUTOMOTIVE ENGINEERING 8 June 2020
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products produced by CHAdeMO or CEC. Tesla has been a member of CHAdeMO since 2012 and Tesla CHAdeMO adaptors are produced and sold by the company. CharIn E.V., the industry group established to develop the Combined Charging System (CCS) as the global standard for charging bat-tery EVs, published a position paper in 2019 opposing any use of adaptors (see https://www.charinev.org/fileadmin/Downloads/Papers_and_Regulations/CharINs_view_on_adaptors_within_the_Combined_Charging_System_v08.pdfhttps://www.charinev.org/member-ship/members-of-charin-ev/).
Paving the way for vehicle-to-grid Bi-directional charging, in which power can also be pulled from the vehicle to the grid, has been a fundamental attribute of the CHAdeMO standard since its incep-tion. But it proved to be a challenge for the ChaoJi project. The proposed new coupler reduced the number of pins from seven to four, removing the optional pin that existed in the original CHAdeMO coupler. It had provided 12-volt auxiliary power to bi-directional chargers.
SAE International’s J3072 standards committee is finalizing updates to meet bi-directional charging requirements to the latest IEEE 1547-2018 standard, ac-cording to Rich Scholer, SAE Hybrid
PEV Communication and Interoperability Task Force chair. The J3072 standard is focused on AC capa-bilities rather than DC. Additionally, IEEE 1547-2018 is also used for SAE DC chargers capable of bi-directional use, Scholer noted.
Under the ChaoJi design, CHAdeMO and China’s GB/T chargers use the same hardware. However, a special inlet adapter and a dedicated bi-directional charging sequence had to be devised to ensure full-backward compatibility of ChaoJi vehicles with the existing bi-directional CHAdeMO chargers that have this optional feature. Blech wrote, “It was quite a challenge to add a new function with the reduced number of signals, while also ensuring robustness, electromagnetic immunity and full backward compatibility with the exist-ing CHAdeMO, GB/T and CCS [Combined Charging System] systems.”
Moreover, a control-pilot circuit de-tects which of the two communications protocols to use, thereby making the two systems compatible. The next step for the ChaoJi project, according to Blech, is to implement full-backward compatibility with the protocol used by CCS for ISO 15118.
While the CHAdeMO Association made global harmonization one of the long-term primary goals, the group understands that it will take automak-ers, charger manufacturers and charg-ing-station operators 10 years or lon-ger to transition to new standards. That’s why backward compatibility also was critical.
But ChaoJi also is forward-looking, especially as it relates to next-genera-tion battery technology.
“How the battery systems are de-signed, in addition to compliance with the specification and standards, will depend on the strategy of each vehicle OEM,” wrote Blech. “But one thing is for sure. The introduction to the EV market, possibly in the mid-2020s, of solid-state batteries capable of accepting ultra-high charging rate without the expensive thermal-management sys-tem, will be a significant breakthrough.”
Bradley Berman
TECHNOLOGY REPORT
PROPULSION
Cummins and Tula test ‘dynamic’ cylinder deactivation for diesels Tula Technology has supplied the con-trol software for “dynamic” cylinder de-activation in gasoline engines since 2018, launching in General Motors’ 5.3- and 6.2-L units powering the Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickup trucks. Compared to the common two-mode implementation in engines, where either all of the cylinders are firing or a fixed number of cylinders are deactivated, Tula’s Dynamic Skip Fire (DSF) makes all of the cylinders selectively “deactivate-able,” according to Scott Bailey, presi-dent and CEO of Tula Technology.
Seventeen steady-state patterns are available in the GM gasoline V8s, but the technology continuously operates whether in a “pattern” or not. Cylinder-deactivation fuel-economy gains in gas-oline engines can be doubled with dy-namic deactivation, Bailey said. In the case of the Silverado’s V8, that’s an up-to-15% improvement in fuel consump-tion compared to about 5-7% with two-mode deactivation.
Now, the Silicon Valley-based tech company is turning its attention to die-sel engines for commercial-vehicle ap-plications, partnering with Cummins to demonstrate diesel Dynamic Skip Fire (dDSF) software on a Cummins X15
Jacobs Vehicle Systems is Tula’s development partner for diesel Dynamic Skip Fire, providing proven cylinder-deactivation hardware that’s already running on production vehicles.
CHAdeMO 3.0 prototype charge connector with the current 2.0 unit.
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Efficiency Series inline six-cylinder. The joint development team began work in early 2019 to integrate dDSF control algorithms to command combustion or deactivation on a cylinder event basis.
Adapting Dynamic Skip Fire from light-duty gasoline engines to heavy-duty die-sels did not present many technical chal-lenges that have not already been solved, John Fuerst, senior VP of engineering at Tula Technology, told Automotive Engineering. “The challenge is not so much hardware, it’s a software and cali-bration exercise that an OEM needs to go through,” he said. “It takes an engine de-velopment cycle to make it all happen. It’s a matter of going through the work of integrating and implementing.”
Deactivation hardware has been in pro-duction for decades, but there is a higher durability requirement for deactivation devices for DSF, Fuerst explained, because the technology is continuously looking to deactivate or reactivate. Several compa-nies produce the required hardware, in-cluding GM Components Holdings, Eaton, Schaeffler, Aisin, and Jacobs Vehicle Systems for heavy-duty application. Jacobs, which is Tula’s development part-ner for dDSF, already has the hardware designed, validated and “running on rigs.”
Exhaust temps up, NOx emissions down Results of the joint development project have been extremely encouraging – not so much for the typical fuel-consump-tion benefits that result from reduced pumping losses, but rather for significant NOx reductions that could prove helpful in meeting the stringent low-load cycle being proposed by the California Air Resources Board (CARB) for model year 2024 heavy-duty trucks — as well as for tighter emissions-reduction regulations pending in other world regions.
In a joint paper for the 2020 Vienna Motor Symposium, Cummins and Tula researchers detailed modeling scenarios that showed NOx reductions of 66% while also improving fuel efficiency by 3.7% or more. “Cylinder deactivation for diesel engines is more of a NOx-reduction, exhaust-temperature-eleva-tion strategy than it is a pumping-loss
strategy,” Fuerst said. “So there’s a fun-damental difference, even though the mechanization and the Tula Dynamic Skip Fire concept are really quite the same [for diesel and gasoline engines].”
The reduction of tailpipe NOx is
achieved primarily by optimized ex-haust temperature control, resulting in “dramatically improved” conversion efficiency of the aftertreatment system. “Because diesels are essentially un-throttled, the opportunity to gain fuel
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Customization drives new Porsche paint process
consumption by eliminating throttling is limited to 2-5%,” Fuerst explained. “But interestingly, because you’re not throt-tled to begin with, when you deactivate diesel cylinders you’re still injecting the same amount of fuel to maintain torque delivery. What you end up doing is sig-nificantly reducing the air-fuel ratio in the combusting cylinders.”
Instead of running a six-cylinder engine at a 75:1 air-fuel ratio, for example, it could be 40:1 or 30:1 when cylinders are deactivated, he said. Reducing the air-fuel ratio this drastically markedly cuts the airflow through the engine, which in turn significantly elevates the exhaust tem-perature. The Vienna paper indicates an exhaust-temperature increase in the range of 50 to 90°C by employing dDSF, which improves the conversion efficiency in the SCR (selective catalytic reduction) catalyst by ensuring the threshold for SCR light-off is met, at about 200°C. Fuerst noted that other engine simula-tions Tula has conducted have shown potential for even greater temperature elevations, as much as 200°C higher.
Many diesels operating under low load only generate exhaust tempera-tures in the range of 150-170°C, said Fuerst. “That’s why the 50 to 90°C in-crease can be critical. We found it opened up significant swaths of the test
Combining manufacturing and paint-shop processes with hardware and soft-ware similar to those used in the print-ing industry, Porsche says it has ready a new customization option for its 911 lineup that will allow customers to ap-
ply a custom design to the paintwork of the vehicle. To demonstrate the tech-nique, Porsche initially is offering the ability to imprint the hood with a recre-ation of the customer’s own fingerprint, but other customer-desired designs are
Actual depiction of what Tula’s DSF algorithm would command to match the torque curve over the 4-second period in the image.
cycle and the real-world operating cycle to the opportunity to be at or above the 200-degree SCR conversion threshold,” he said. “The temperature elevation is really where the money is in terms of why companies want to do this.”
Beyond the direct fuel-consumption benefit with dDSF, there’s potential sec-ondary fuel savings, according to Fuerst. If cylinder deactivation isn’t used, other strategies will be needed to reduce NOx emissions, such as post-injection in the cylinders to increase exhaust temperature, employing a sev-enth burner to ensure the SCR catalyst stays active, or electrical heating that also requires diesel fuel for generation. Carbon dioxide reduction in the double digits is possible if the fuel saved by not employing such strategies is consid-ered, he claimed.
Cummins and Tula plan to continue their collaboration by conducting a full system optimization and working to minimize cylinder deactivation-generat-ed NVH in commercial-vehicle applica-tions. On-vehicle testing also will occur. A Freightliner Cascadia demonstration vehicle will be shared with industry partners later in 2020, Bailey said. Tula holds more than 140 patents and has another 120 patents pending.
Ryan Gehm
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Technicians display the hood of a 911 customized via the company’s newly-developed “direct printing” paint process.
intended to be offered later. The company developed the new
“direct printing” paint method in con-junction with partners, saying the tech-nique makes it possible to produce painted designs “that are not possible with conventional painting.” Currently, adding special designs on specific areas of a vehicle’s sheetmetal typically is
achieved by applying film graphics or so-called “skins,” but Porsche said that in terms of aesthetics and tactile sensa-tion, the new paint process is superior to film-based appliques.
Porsche explained that the technol-ogy is similar to an inkjet printer. A print head applies paint to three-dimensional components automatically and without overspray. “The ability to control the nozzles individually permits targeted application of every paint droplet,” said Christian Will, vice president — produc-tion development at Porsche AG. “The complexity is due to the necessity of harmonizing three technologies: robot technology (control, sensors, program-ming), application technology (print head, graphic handling) and paint tech-nology (application process, paint).”
Setting up the cell A “technology cell” created in the paint shop of Porsche’s Zuffenhausen training
center developed and tested the new manufacturing and paint processes and is used to train technicians. Customers can specify the paint, as is done with many other customization options, through the Porsche Exclusive Manufaktur center in Zuffenhausen, which has 30 employees dedicated to installing an array of cosmetic and “technical personalization options.”
After a customer’s new 911 has been built, the specialists in the Exclusive Manufaktur operation remove the hood and the robotic print head paints the data-secured representation of the owner’s fingerprint. The hood then re-ceives an additional clearcoat spray and is polished to production standard be-fore reinstallation onto the car.
For now, the new paint-customization process also carries an exclusive price: 7500 euros in Germany. The option’s availability began in March 2020.
Bill Visnic
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Aluminum is synonymous with “weight-saving” in most con-temporary automotive-engineering reference points. But apart from a few applications – most notably Ford’s F-Series pickups – aluminum largely is deployed where
steel can be readily displaced without performance loss or for com-paratively small components that deliver comparatively small weight or process savings.
Electric-vehicle maker Tesla is readying the next step in aluminum use, however – one that effectively matches Ford’s “big gain” approach by specifying a massive piece of structural die-cast aluminum for the rear underbody of the recently launched Model Y crossover. According to Tesla CEO Elon Musk, this new aluminum application represents a radical step for its design and manufacturing advantages and its light-weighting potential. Musk is renowned for outsized promises, but in
the case of the Model Y’s die-cast rear underbody, his enthusiasm for this advanced use of aluminum – cast by a house-sized “giga press” – is supported by manu-facturing experts who call it a game-changer.
“It’s definitely an all-new look at how to do things,” asserted Laurie Harbour, president at Harbour Results Inc. manufacturing consultancy. “Elon Musk has always pressed his engineers to be creative.”
Reductions in – pretty much everythingMusk spoke in detail about the new casting process in an episode of the “Third Row Tesla Podcast” in April and made more than a passing mention of it in Tesla’s
The EV maker boldly invests in the world’s largest aluminum die-casting machine to manufacture entire rear underbody structures.
by Bill Visnic
Tesla casts a new strategy for lightweight structures
LIGHTWEIGHT METALS
IDRA Group’s OL 5500, one of the company’s new Giga Press lineup designed to produce large aluminum die castings.
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1Q2020 financial results call in early May.“The current version of Model Y has basically two big
high-pressure diecast [HPDC] aluminum castings that are joined and there’s still a bunch of other bits that are attached. Later this year,” he said on the podcast, “we’ll transition to the rear underbody being a single-piece casting that also integrates the rear crash rails.
“It gets better,” he continued. “The current castings, because you’ve got to interface with so many different things, we have to CNC-machine the interfaces and there’s a bunch of things that have to be joined; they have datums on them and that kind of thing. The sin-gle-piece casting has no CNC machining – it doesn’t even have datums. It took us a lot of iterations, by the way, to get there.”
Sandy Munro, CEO at Munro & Associates, the benchmarking and competitive analysis firm renowned for its highly analytic “teardowns” of popular and in-novative vehicles, recently completed a teardown of a Model Y. A series of internet videos covering Munro’s assessment garnered more than 36 million impres-sions in little more than a month. Munro was particu-larly impressed by the current two-piece aluminum underbody structure – and openly offered admiration in an interview with SAE’s Automotive Engineering.
He said the current Tesla Model Y has “two of the biggest castings we’ve ever seen in a car. We’ve never seen them used in an automobile before of that size. There’s lots [of innovative aluminum applications] at Cadillac, BMW, Audi – they’ve all used castings. But nothing quite the size of this thing.”
Munro also participated in the podcast in which Musk spoke of the coming single-piece casting.
Moving to the “megacasting,” as Munro dubbed it, “definitely wins the prize,” he asserted. “That’s going to be the biggest casting for quite a while. Nobody’s exploring that.”
It happens to “require the world’s biggest casting machine, which we have two of. It’s the size of a small house, basically,” gushed Musk. “It has a big effect on the ease of manufacturing.”
The mammoth machine is being supplied by IDRA Group, an Italian leader in HPDC equipment founded in 1946. Tesla is the first customer for IDRA’s hulking OL6100 CS (with upgraded locking force to handle the special Tesla casting), destined for installation in the company’s Fremont, California and Shanghai, China, plants. IDRA’s “Giga Press” measures some 64 feet (19.5 m) long and 17 feet (5.3 m) tall. Along
Area of the Model Y’s body structure that soon will be encompassed by a
single cast component.
One side of the current Model Y’s two-piece rear-underbody aluminum casting.
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with the higher clamping force is a maximum aluminum-alloy “shot” weight of 104.6 kg (231 lb). The OL6100’s output may be lightweight castings, but the machine itself is anything but light, weighing in ex-cess of 410 tons.
The single-piece casting for Model Y will replace around 70 stampings, extrusions and castings that currently make up the same fabricated assembly in the Model 3, on which much of the Model Y is based. Musk described the Model 3’s rear structure as “a patch-work quilt – it’s not great. The complexity in the body shop is in-sane,” he said.
Harbour agreed. With such a large and inclusive casting, “Even with a big cycle time, you eliminate all the labor to assemble pieces and subcomponents,” she observed. “You’re saving on automation
cells, you’re saving on people. It would be tough to put dollars to it, but think of multiple suppliers doing stampings, you could save maybe 20% on labor cost. And reduction in footprint is major. My guess is that it’s a net-net efficiency gain.”
Musk claimed the new single-piece casting design, and the goliath IDRA machine that will produce it, will deliver a 30% reduction in the size of the body shop. He added that the process probably will transfer to Model 3 production as well. “That’s the thing we want to bring to bear on the Model 3 over time,” he said.
Potential caveats Munro said Tesla is pondering a similar strategy for the front of the Model Y. And a large casting probably makes changes to the affected structure a less-expensive prop-osition than “trying to change a bunch of stamping dies.” Alterations such as wheelbase changes also could easily be accommodated by such an architecture, he said.
But it wouldn’t be the approach for low-volume pro-duction, Munro maintained. And “castings don’t repair very well,” he added. “If an impact was severe enough, the car’s a write-off,” he said. Of course, such is the case with many contemporary vehicle designs.
Munro said Tesla plans to assemble up to 1 million vehicles annually off the Model Y architecture, so the company’s Giga Press investment likely is a sound one. He and Harbour agree that the mega-casting ap-proach is an example of Tesla being Tesla. “They do continuous improvement in design,” a practice most auto companies typically don’t embrace, Munro said.
Tesla casts a new strategy for lightweight structures
Munro and Associates’ CEO Sandy Munro.
Continuous innovation for the new Model Y is expected to carry into other Tesla models.
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The Automotive Division of the Society of Plastics Engineers (SPE®) is announcing a “Call for Nominations” for its 50th-annual Automotive Innovation Awards Gala, the oldest and largest recognition event in the automotive and plastics industries. This year’s Awards Gala will be held Wednesday, November 19, 2020 at the Burton Manor in Livonia, Mich. Winning part nominations (due by September, 15, 2020) in 10 different categories, and the teams that developed them, will be honored with a Most Innovative Use of Plastics award. A Grand Award will be presented to the winning team from all category award winners.
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In the constantly evolving world of automaking, Dr. Karl Haider, Chief Commercial Officer of Tata Steel Europe (TSE) is certain of one thing: that steel will continue to be the industry’s material of choice. In an exclusive interview, he told SAE International: “It will
remain so for the next 20 years and beyond. A major reason for that high degree of success is its infinite recyclability. I believe steel is not just one of the best, but the best automotive material for car manu-facture because it can be recycled again and again. And our R&D programs ensure that it is continually improving.”
Speaking at TSE’s HQ (in IJmuiden, the Netherlands), Haider said that despite the global focus on sustainability, society in general will continue to want new vehicles without exploiting earth’s natural resources.
“Both society and the auto industry will want a ‘circular’ economy, with high levels of recycled material being used,” he said. “We are planning for this. For example, the science is in place to produce steel in different ways; in TSE we can apply multiple technologies for our industry to become carbon neutral.”
An example is the company’s HIsarna technology, he said, designed and developed as a consortium project at TSE’s IJmuiden facility lo-cated at the mouth of the North Sea Canal to Amsterdam. (It also has a steel-making site in the U.K.) Haider terms Hlsarna a “game changer,” facilitating future steel production with “far lower” CO2 emissions.
HIsarna is a substitute for the blast-furnace process. To make liquid iron in a blast furnace, iron ore and metallurgical coal are pre-processed into sinter (lumps of iron ore), pellets (small balls of iron ore) and cokes.
Steel’s infinite recyclability will help it remain the auto industry’s material of choice, insists Tata Steel Europe’s CCO.
by Stuart Birch
But with the HIsarna process, the raw materials are in-jected as powders, directly converting them into liquid iron. Use of carbon capture and storage (CCS) or carbon capture and use (CCU) disciplines leads up to a “nearly zero” carbon footprint, he stated.
The HIsarna plant produces liquid iron to be pro-cessed into steel for high-end automotive application. “Internationally, the big aim for carbon neutrality is to achieve it by 2050,” Haider said. “In my view, that is too late. With a combination of technologies, including the Hlsarna process, we can take a large step already. Industry needs to act earlier.”
He regards 2030-35 to be the appropriate timeframe to have made significant progress. Even if TSE will not be completely carbon-neutral at that stage, the company is determined to take the lead against competitors vying for similar sustainability benchmarks; TSE hopes to achieve a 30-40% reduction in carbon emissions within 10 years.
Haider lists electrification, digitalization and sus-tainability as TSEs overall tria in juncta uno support-ing its future plans in which the auto industry takes some 25% of its output. “We aim to go lightweight with highly advanced steels offering OEMs value in application engineering. And our steel is not just for BIW (body-in-white) structures. We have a role in
Steelmaking by night: TSE’s Hlsarna plant in the Netherlands is leading efforts toward carbon neutrality.
LIGHTWEIGHT METALS
Steel the Real Deal
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electric motors with our ultra-thin (non-grain ori-ented) Hi-Lite electrical steel.”
Produced at TSE’s plant in Surahammar, Sweden, Hi-Lite has been designed to both save weight and to mini-mize magnetic losses. The company’s detailed descrip-tion of Hi-Lite states that non-oriented electrical steels between 0.10 mm (.0039-in) and 1.00 mm thick are criti-cal in the manufacturing of rotating machines of all sizes and a variety of other electromagnetic applications. “Their magnetic properties are combined with tailored insulation coatings which offer the best performance required for the manufacturing process and final appli-
cation. The final annealing refines magnetic properties after which the bespoke insulation coating is applied,” Haider explained.
Regarding EVs, Haider said that steels with tensile strengths of 1000 megapascals (MPa) or greater are used to provide energy ab-sorption and minimal penetration into the battery-protection struc-tures to safeguard against crash damage. The increasing focus within the auto industry of high-level automated vehicles of various cabin configurations will require lightweight high-end steels with different crash-absorbing paths. This would require 1000-MPa steel or another type, but with generally lower thickness and higher formability to ensure light weight and a good structural integrity.
PVD progress In terms of body-structure longevity, the theoretical life expectancy of a high-volume 2020 vehicle now is based more on mechanical replace-ment cost-effective ratios than structural corrosion. This is partly down to greatly improved galvanizing, its use and effectiveness increasing in the auto industry from the process’s first high-volume introduction in the 1970s-1980s to today’s highly protected vehicles. Further advances are in prospect. With partners, including South Korean steel company POSCO, TSE is working towards the use of physical vapor deposition (PVD) coating technology in which metallic coating is vaporized and condenses onto the steel substrate. For this new process, TSE’s devel-opment is centered on a laboratory in the Netherlands. The technique could make a further significant contribution to vehicle life, although large-scale production is not scheduled before 2025.
Haider stressed the need for such programs to ensure the steel in-dustry maintains its focus on the future and continues to anticipate the auto industry’s needs. Was there a lack of that focus 20 years ago? “Maybe. The steel industry’s nose was perhaps a little too high!” he admitted. “But in recent years that has changed completely. If we are
Steel applications throughout contemporary light vehicles.
Tata Steel Europe’s Dr. Karl Haider: “If we are not working in a tailored way with OEMs, we will not be successful; the R&D engineering know-how is essential.”
Steel’s crashworthiness performance for EV battery protection is vital. Steel with tensile strength of 1000 MPa or greater is used by TSE.
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not working in a tailored way with the OEMs, we will not be successful; the R&D engineering know-how is essential – to understand exactly what engineers want from a materials’ science aspect. We can guide them. And in the future we will need to develop new chemistries and new temperature profiles in our process lines to match their needs for materials with high strength and excellent formability.”
TSE’s future strategy certainly includes digitalization within the auto industry’s value chain, allowing for material traceability and quality tracking to ensure more efficient processing and continuous adaption to customer-specific demands. The company expects a still faster time to market for new products that are better-tailored to customer needs to enhance quality and lower total cost of ownership (TCO). The company
uses a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) service to help cus-tomers understand their own carbon footprint.
Steel-polymer honeycomb Asked what TSE’s is doing to further steel’s role in many OEMs’ expanding mixed-materials strategies – and of new joining technologies that enable disparate materials to be glued, screwed or otherwise fused to-gether – Haider said: “We have a very open-minded R&D department. They are always looking at process-ing, at welding – and gluing. For example, we have invested in technology combining galvanized steel sheet with a polymer honeycomb.”
Called Coretinium, the hybrid sheet has been used for commercial-vehicle trailers. Haider said the result is a very stiff solution with potential for further applica-tions, particularly in light commercial vehicles. TSE’s description of Coretinium describes its interlayer adhe-sion as delivering “levels up to twice those of other composites, ensuring it maintains its composite rigid-ity even in demanding load situations.” Also, the resul-tant smooth cell structure and optimised cell geom-etry help avoid surface dimpling (the golf-ball effect) common with most thin-skinned honeycomb compos-ites. This core then is combined with steel skins in a continuous-coil-fed lamination process.
All this supports Haider’s claim that steel will remain the most preferred material for the auto industry into the future. He summed up TSE’s stated aims as pio-neering the next generation of steel products for auto-makers, to further lightweight products and reduce overall emissions, while planning what he terms the creation of “the steel plant of the future.”
Ready to roll: TSE’s steel making sites are in the Netherlands and south Wales in the UK.
Steel the Real Deal
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STAINLESS STEEL | MATERIALS FEATURE
Not since Ford’s epic switch to aluminum for its F-Series body structures has an automaker’s materials strategy created such a buzz. Tesla’s decision to use stainless steel for its up-coming Cybertruck, as part of what CEO Elon Musk calls an
“exoskeletal” architecture, aims to give the new electric pickup strength and durability beyond that of its competitors. The vehicle is slated to enter production in late 2021.
Musk described the corrosion-resistant, 3-mm-thick (.118-in) sheet specified for Cybertruck as “ultra-hard 30X cold-rolled stainless-steel,” indicating an alloy variant developed from 300-series stainless steel. This popular class was used by DeLorean (304 alloy) in its roughly 10,000 DMC-12 sports cars, and by heavy-truck maker Autocar (302 alloy) in a small-volume run in the 1960s. During the same period Ford also experimented with a few stainless-bodied Thunderbirds and Lincolns, also in 302 alloy. Today’s exhaust pipes typically use ferritic stainless tube.
“Tesla’s strategy with this truck is very interesting,” observed Dr. David Matlock, professor emeritus at the Colorado School of Mines’ Advanced Steel Processing and Products Research Center. Reviewing Musk’s public comments on Cybertruck online, Matlock surmises that the material is “very likely a modified version of the lean-alloyed 301 austenitic 301 alloy.” When this alloy system is deformed or cold-worked, it transforms into a microstructure that includes austenite and martensite, primary constituents for a strong and tough metal.
“The more you deform it, such as cold rolling, the more martensite you get. And that contributes to a significant increase in strength,” he explained. Martensitic high-strength (non-stainless) steels are in-creasingly used in vehicle structures to increase strength, but they achieve their hardness through heating and quenching as is done in press hardened steel used in automobiles today. By comparison, the lean austenitic stainless alloys can create martensites by cold-roll-induced transformation at room temperature, Matlock noted.
But while Tesla’s proprietary 30X-alloy stainless skin may endow
A proprietary 301-series stainless steel gives Tesla’s first pickup truck unique sales attributes while saving tooling cost.
by Lindsay Brooke
Cybertruck with industry-leading dent resistance, the ma-terial spec and the exoskeleton design force tradeoffs. “Cold rolling makes this material very strong but sacrifices ductility and formability. That means a minimum subse-quent metal forming is possible and dictates mostly flat panels and straight character lines,” Matlock said. The truck’s faceted outer body contributes to the strength of the vehicle structure, unlike a conventional body-in-white whose strength comes from controlling the A- and B-pillar geometries and using combinations of press-hardened steels.
As a result, the Tesla truck’s polarizing “planar” styl-ing is either Blade Runner-cool or high-school-metal-shop crude, depending on your aesthetic sense.
The material characteristics and robust 3-mil sheet thickness (typical steel door panels are on the order of 0.7mm to 1mm) spurred Musk to claim that the “ultra-hard 30X” can break a stamping press. Hyperbolic or not, Tesla has engineered a material and manufactur-ing solution that requires minimal forming operations, enabling huge potential savings in presses, dies and related operations for its radical new pickup.
With 3-mm-thick austenitic stainless-steel cargo bed and body panels, Tesla’s
Cybertruck should win the dent-resistance derby.
Tesla’s Cybertruck is audaciously austeniticLIGHTWEIGHT METALS
In the 1960s, Edgcomb Steel contracted Autocar Trucks to build 17 road tractors in bright stainless to promote its primary product line. The 302-alloy sheet was sourced from Armco Steel. The nine stainless Autocars surviving today are prized by collectors, including this one owned by the Iowa-80 Truck Museum.
AUTOMOTIVE ENGINEERING 20 June 2020
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Automakers for years have been focused on lightweighting their vehicles, motivated by fuel economy, performance and safety. This engineering task is becoming increasingly difficult as the areas to trim become fewer and the requirements become
more stringent (namely fuel/battery economy). It is estimated that (on average) every pound of savings on structural, load-bearing parts pro-vides an opportunity to save nearly a pound on subsystems (steering, brakes, suspension, etc.), a trend known as mass-decompounding.
This figure decreases as the design cycle progresses and subsys-tems are locked-in, so lightweighting should be considered in design as early as possible to maximize these compounding effects.
Traditional CAD certainly still has its place in automotive design, but there is a glaring need in the industry for more-advanced compu-tational tools that are built on solid and modern foundations; ones designed for the new materials and technologies that automotive engineers now have available to them, such as composites and addi-tive manufacturing.
We’re learning to bond and hybridize very dissimilar materials to reach new levels of automotive performance. In the quest for light-weighting, the same will hold true of the design tools themselves. Instead of mixed-materials, we have mixed data-sources: surfaces from CAD, meshes from FEA, density fields or stress results from CAE, and real-world measurements like scan data or digitally-imaged
New computational tools enable an integrated data-fusion approach to complex, mixed-materials engineering. An expert from nTopology explains.
by Jonathan Harris, Ph.D
strains. Just like physical materials, these need to be synthesized and fused together digitally to reach new levels of performance.
Workflow benefitsWhat’s been broadly missing in the industry are the tools to execute this complex mixed-material, multi-objective design and optimization process—with con-sideration of a wide range of multiple data sources be-ing used where they’re best suited.
This is where computational engineering tools fit in, enabling an integrated data-fusion approach to engineer-ing design in which the many factors and measurements relevant to the engineering process can be integrated into a single, high-performance design representation.
With this new multi-factor approach to design, the many simultaneous lightweighting opportunities avail-able in automotive can be more fully exploited.
Computational engineering delivers results dramati-cally faster than previous computer-aided design methodologies—on a unified platform founded in im-plicit algorithms that calculate solutions extremely
Lightweight design beyond CADLIGHTWEIGHT METALS
Mass decompounding in an automotive design context. With a lighter chassis, a smaller (and lighter) engine is required to achieve the same performance. That in turn means smaller brakes to decelerate the lighter vehicle and a further-lightened chassis to support these lighter subsystems. This can add up to secondary mass savings far greater than the initial lightweighting task.
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COMPUTATIONAL DESIGN FEATURE
rapidly. This provides repeatable, customizable work-flows that integrate all the design tools (both internal and externally-sourced) that an engineer needs to, say, lightweight a solid metal brake pedal with an internal lattice structure (see May 2019 AE, page 30: https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/sae/19AUTP05/index.php#/p/30).
Within this kind of software platform, a lightweight-ing toolkit can help automotive engineers reduce the overall weight of components via part consolidation, conformal ribbing, lattices and topology optimization/generative design. Structural performance constraints embedded in the analyses support multiphysics simu-lations to verify the integrity of the results and pave the way for prototyping, real-world testing, and pro-duction. Established workflows for lightweighting and performance can be saved, shared and applied to a wide variety of part geometries for highly automated design optimization.
Trying to achieve such sophisticated designs with conventional optimization tools based on simple com-pliance-minimization (e.g. generative design) tends to result in hard-to-manufacture shapes that don’t deliver ideal crashworthy collapse and crush results. We some-times hear of days being spent to reconstruct the native geometry of a shape-optimized density field or simula-tion mesh, and weeks wrestling sketch relations and offsets to shell it for crashworthiness requirements. That hollow part then requires remeshing and revalidating to locally adapt the wall thickness, and this entire manual process inevitably is repeated for several design itera-tions. The design effort required to trim out those final few pounds increases exponentially.
Optimizing for additive manufacturing Automakers are increasingly exploring additive manufacturing (AM, or 3D-printing) technologies, with several already implementing the technology in production components. While not the complete solu-tion to full-volume production in automotive, AM machines continue to evolve in capability and decrease in cost, and are increasingly be-ing used to produce many smaller lighter-weight parts and consoli-dated assemblies for vehicles.
Computational engineering tools are what connects the engineer to this newfound manufacturing capability and enables them to take advantage of the full complexity that these machines can deliver. This complexity is what brings conventional sketch-based tools to a halt, where parts as simple as a sculpted shift-knob can contain thou-sands of edges or millions of mesh-triangles.
Proving out part geometries quickly and accurately, transferring di-rectly to printers as toolpaths without error-prone triangles, is where computational engineering tools shine. Concurrent with the geometric optimization phase of a part designed for AM, the software provides an “architected materials” functionality, with which the overall geom-etry of the structure is automatically adjusted into free-flowing densi-ties and/or varying wall-thicknesses, based on those critical multiphys-ics-field inputs like stress or temperature distribution.
New manufacturing and material technologies are undeniably challeng-ing traditional sketch-based CAD architectures and workflows. Navigating these changing, novel design spaces requires the ability to efficiently inte-grate multiple engineering disciplines within a single platform and to fully automate and capture advanced workflows for future projects.
Computational engineering software is stepping up today to help marry advanced manufacturing with advanced design. The opportu-nity for automotive engineers is to better create highly innovative and complex products with often breakthrough functionality.
Jonathan Harris is lead application engineer at nTopology
Conventional topology optimization (or generative design) is just step one of load-path identification and generally produces solid parts. For crashworthiness, most automotive parts need to be hollow to allow energy absorption through large plastic deformations (i.e., crumple zones and crash tubes). An advanced design technique is to shell the part with the wall thickness directly based on stress data and iteratively validate this with crash simulations.
Some of the many mixed data-sources involved in modern computational engineering. Each has value, but also limitations. A hybridization or data-fusion approach allows engineers to optimize their parts to previously unimaginable levels. Where the arrowheads lie on each of these lines often is case-specific and more (or fewer) data sources may apply.
Sensor technologies and driving robotsThrough a new coopera-tion between Kistler Group (Winterthur, Germany) and Vehico (Braunschweig, Germany) an extensive package of sensor technologies and driving robots now will be available from a single source. The combination offers integrated solutions for vehicle dynamics and active safety testing systems. Kistler’s sensors measure different forces affect-ing the vehicle and the driver, for example on brakes, the steer-ing wheel and on the wheels themselves. Vehico’s driving robots provide objective vehicle testing, precise and reproducible tests up to driverless testing by automatic steering, gas and brake robots. In addition, Vehico platforms can simulate other road users, from walking pedestrians to fast-moving vehicles. Rather than choosing sensors and robots individually, customers can now obtain an extensive portfolio from a single source.
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Deceleration crash sled With MESSRING’s (Munich, Germany) M=SLED Small Overlap, there is now an option to cost-effectively test criti-cal chassis components that could penetrate the passenger compartment of a vehicle without de-stroying an entire car body. The ability to examine the crash behavior of the chassis individually can provide important information for further research and development early in the development process and prevent expensive mis develop-ments. Designed for use with the MESSRING HydroBrake, the test sled has been consequently constructed to simulate the small overlap test scenario on the left side of the vehicle real-istically. The chassis to be tested runs freely rolling on the ground at up to 64 km/h against a load cell wall that is held in the contour of the small overlap barrier and is then deceler-ated in a controlled process up to the breaking point.
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NVH constrained layer damping
Avery Dennison Performance Tapes’ (Painesville, Ohio) SoundBond constrained layer damping technology is a noise, vibration, harshness (NVH) damper. SoundBond’s combina-tion of lightweight properties and optimized damping perfor-mance can be tuned to specific NVH applications, allowing damping to be manipulated from a broad curve to a specific frequency band while delivering weight savings within the application. Offering a lightweight alternative to traditional butyl and liquid-applied sound dampers, SoundBond pro-vides 30% to 50% weight savings over butyl, delivering light-weighting properties to enhance vehicle fuel savings. Because it offers high flexural rigidity, it is easier to handle than butyl and reduces installation time, thus saving labor costs. Damping performance can be tuned based on temperature and frequency ranges, thus maximizing its effectiveness.
For more information, visit http://info.hotims.com/76516-400
Acrylic adhesive solutionHenkel (Düsseldorf, Germany) and Covestro (Pittsburgh, Pa.) developed a solution enabling the efficient fixation of cylindrical li-ion bat-tery cells inside a plastic cell holder. The solution is based on a UV-curing ad-hesive from Henkel and a UV-transparent polycarbonate blend from Covestro. With a strong consumer push to reduce EV prices, large-scale and cost-efficient li-ion battery cell assembly is a pre-requisite for every automotive OEM. As such, Henkel’s Loctite AA 3963 battery assembly adhesives and Covestro’s UV transparent polycarbonate blend Bayblend were devel-oped for compatibility with high-volume automated dis-pensing techniques and offer flexible and fast cure mecha-nisms. The acrylic adhesive was formulated for use with the cell holder, which is constructed of a special flame-retardant plastic. It provides strong adhesion to the substrate material and offers production adaptability through long open times and short cure cycles.
For more information, visit http://info.hotims.com/76516-401
SPOTLIGHT: ADHESIVES
PRODUCT BRIEFS
AUTOMOTIVE ENGINEERING 22 June 2020
PRODUCT BRIEFS
Automotive Ethernet TesterRUETZ SYSTEM SOLUTIONS’ (Munich, Germany) Automotive Ethernet Tester (AET) is a highly-automated test system for OPEN Alliance TC8 switching and AVB/TSN tests at the compo-nent level. The test cases are script-based and parameterized prior to a test run via a single configuration file that contains all relevant properties of the device under test (DUT). The DUT and the test cases can be configured via easy-to-understand application interfaces. The AET consists of a 19-in test rack with control and analysis software. A PC control unit regulates the test system. Depending on the implementation, the test platform can con-tain up to 15 Ethernet ports (100BASE-T1, 1000BASE-T1), each of which can simulate and evaluate specific test scenarios. The test platform provides a display and PPS output for pre-cise evaluation of the gPTP synchronization, as well as a dis-play for the port status.
For more information, visit http://info.hotims.com/76516-405
Dual-motor inverterSuitable for high-power and high-torque electric vehicle propulsion, BorgWarner subsid-iary Cascadia Motion LLC’s (Portland, Ore.) PM500 is the largest inverter in their prod-uct line. This dual-motor inverter can deliver a combined 700 kW (940 hp) worth of peak power to the motors by way of 840-V capa-bility and 1400 Arms combined-phase current. Independent control of each motor allows the PM500 to be used on du-al-stack motors (two motor cores with singular output) as well as torque vectoring applications, where torque is var-ied between driver and passenger side wheels to aid cor-nering. Not just for motorsports and high-performance cars, the inverter is also applicable to commercial vehicle appli-cations requiring dual powerful motors, high voltage and high current. According to Cascadia Motion, the motivation behind PM500 was to double that capability while also shrinking into a downsized enclosure and using an ad-vanced heat exchanger.
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www.masterbond.comHackensack NJ, 07601 USA ∙ +1.201.343.8983 ∙ [email protected]
Hardness, 75°F75-85 Shore D
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HIGH STRENGTH ADHESIVESupreme 11HT-3A
Network interface The Vector (Stuttgart, Germany) VN5620 is a compact interface for analysis, simulation, and test-ing tasks for automo-tive Ethernet net-works and CAN/CAN FD. This interface enables users to ben-efit from a wide vari-ety of possible uses like Ethernet monitoring, remaining bus simulation, media conversion and direct access to individual ports. With the VN5620, the developer can cover a broad range of applica-tion areas. Ethernet monitoring, for example, ensures a trans-parent connection between two nodes with a precise time stamp. Free hardware configuration options make it possible for users to design an existing bus simulation with CANoe Ethernet. The VN5620 also features media conversion func-tions and a data link between 100BASE-T1/1000BASE-T1 and the 100BASE-TX/1000BASE-T physical layer. The user can utilize the interface both at the office and on test benches, as the temperature and voltage ranges have been designed ac-cordingly for these purposes.
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Hybrid hexapodDeveloped by ALIO Industries (Arvada, Colo.) to address the inher-ent performance limitations of con-ventional hexapods, the Angulares Hybrid Hexapod features precision-crossed roller bearing guides, opti-cal incremental or absolute encoder feedback on all axes, linear motor and/or servo ball screw drives. Angulares also offers unlimited pro-grammable tool center point loca-tions and coordinate offsets and zero backlash on all axes. The design makes the Angulares ca-pable of unlimited XY travel, Z travel for 62 mm that can be increased to 208 mm using other tripod models, tip/tilt travel of 60 degrees (±30 degrees) with continuous 360 degree Theta-Z, XYZ bidirectional repeatability of less than ±0.6 arc-seconds, velocity up to 100 mm/second XY and Z, and less than 10 nanometers linear and 0.1 arc-seconds angular mini-mum incremental motion.
For more information, visit http://info.hotims.com/76516-410
Over-voltage protection PCBThe precision dual-channel SABMBOVP2XX family of products from Advanced Linear Devices, Inc. (ALD) (Sunnyvale, Calif.) auto-matically balance superca-pacitors with the addition of over-voltage protection (OVP). The ultra-low power enables energy-efficient supercapacitor balancing, which is suitable for prod-ucts that require low-loss energy power, leakage cur-
rent regulation, and OVP such as automotive, transportation, automation, data centers, and power grids. SABMBOVP2XX printed circuit boards (PCB) include a plug-and-play feature that enables precision voltage clamp circuits with extremely high current gains. This combination is suited for balancing large supercapacitors that are stacked in a series, from two to hundreds of cells with values of 0.1F to 3,000F and beyond. The SABMBOVP2XX family has a high current gain (dl/dV = ~3 mA/1 mV) amplifier, which typically produces more than 1,000,000 times the output increase with very small incre-ments of less than 100 mV in input change.
For more information, visit http://info.hotims.com/76516-407
Carrier board D3 Engineering’s (Rochester, NY) DesignCore Carrier Board al-lows engineers to quickly connect multiple cameras or sensors with the recently launched NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX module to enable AI at the edge. Sensor data is delivered via a serial link and is deserialized into MIPI CSI-2 data for consumption on the Jetson Xavier NX module. This allows the sensors to be placed up to 15 m (49 ft) away from the processing unit. An on-board FPGA provides hardware-level synchronization capability. “The new DesignCore Carrier Board allows our customers to take advantage of the incredible compute power of the Jetson Xavier NX by connecting up to 12 streams of input data,” said Jason Enslin, Product Line Manager for Embedded Vision at D3 Engineering. This enables the development of ad-vanced AI robotics and autonomous applications for man-ufacturing, delivery, retail, agriculture, and more—in a pow-er-efficient and compact form factor.
For more information, visit http://info.hotims.com/76516-408
SPOTLIGHT: ELECTRONICS
PRODUCT BRIEFS
Haptic ICsThe new Cirrus Logic (Austin, Texas) CS40L25 family of boosted haptic drivers enables OEMs to cre-ate customized user experiences beyond the single-action response of today’s mechanical buttons. The new haptic solutions can help cre-ate context-aware “virtual” buttons for almost any surface. By eliminating mechanical buttons, prod-uct designers can create cleaner, sleeker industrial design aes-thetics with no button “bumps.” The CS40L25 products integrate a high-performance haptic driver, a digital signal processor and a boost converter. The devices are resonance-aware, drive high-performance linear resonant actuators (LRAs) and voice coil mo-tors (VCMs), and enhance user experiences by supporting unique/pre-stored haptic waveforms. Ultra-low latency provides real-time control of the haptic motor. This provides users with a more immediate sensation or response. Closed loop algorithms maximize LRA effectiveness and enable strong and consistent haptics with a crisper, less “buzzy” effect.
For more information, visit http://info.hotims.com/76516-409
AUTOMOTIVE ENGINEERING 24 June 2020
Isolated switcher ICsThe InnoSwitch 3-MX isolated switcher IC family from Power Integrations (San Jose, Calif.) has been expanded with the addi-tion of three new PowiGaN devices. As part of a chipset with Power Integrations’ InnoMux controller IC, the new switcher ICs now support display and appliance power supply applications with a continuous output power of up to 75 W without a heatsink. The InnoMux chipset employs a unique single-stage power architecture that reduces losses in display applications by 50% when compared to conventional de-signs, increasing overall efficiency to 91% in constant-voltage and constant-current LED backlight driver designs. Additionally, by eliminating the need for post regulation (i.e. buck and boost) stages, TV and monitor designers can halve component count, improving reliability and reducing manufacturing cost.
For more information, visit http://info.hotims.com/76516-412
GNSS-aided measurementThe GNSS-aided inertial system Automotive Dynamic Motion Analyzer (ADMA) from GeneSys (Offenburg, Germany) was devel-oped specifically for vehicle dynamics test-ing and ADAS evaluation in the automotive industries. The high-precision inertial mea-surement unit (IMU) provides reliable posi-tion and motion data of a vehicle “live” and without drift when the vehicle is stationary. Due to its precise inertial sensors, commissioning and initialization of the ADMA can be performed in just a few minutes. Once the antenna has been mounted on the vehicle roof, the ADMA is installed in the vehicle and the cables are connected, the configuration is quickly completed via the built-in web interface.
For more information, visit http://info.hotims.com/76516-416
Lighting seriesHELLA’s (Atlanta, Ga.) LED worklight series Modular Worklight’s design has been adapted to the modular lamp series called Shapeline. By combining the two lighting series, vehicle manu-facturers can give an individual ap-pearance even to their small-quantity series. The worklight series is available in the two design lines: TECH (classic straight lines) and STYLE (dynamically curved). Depending on the required light output, customers can also choose between BASE and PRIME versions. In addition to the standard light distributions for close-range and long-range illumination, the Modular Worklight series is also available in glare-free illumination variant ZEROGLARE. Vehicle manufacturers can swap a successor generation for smart future solutions one-to-one, eliminating the need for costly de-sign changes to offer their customers a lighting upgrade.
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Position control hinges The E6 One-Way Constant Torque Hinge from Southco, Inc. (Concordville, Pa.) en-ables heavy doors and panels to be lifted more easily by removing friction from the hinge in one direction, while providing high torque to hold them securely in place. Sealed for outdoor use and constructed from corrosion-resis-tant materials, the E6 One-Way Constant Torque Hinge offers increased longevity and requires no maintenance or adjust-ment over the lifetime of most applications, making it a suit-able solution for off-highway access panels, automotive center consoles and industrial printers. Southco’s line of position con-trol hinges is available in a wide variety of torque ranges, sizes and materials to satisfy a variety of application requirements.
For more information, visit http://info.hotims.com/76516-415
High-pressure springsLee Spring’s (Wokingham, England) ex-stock range of high-pressure springs are designed to save space and to enable compact product design by combining an unusual selection of performance characteristics that specifically suit small applications with high loading requirements. High-pressure springs offer small physical size with high force capacity operat-ing over short distance and small deflections, delivering high per-formance and saving money on maintenance. These low-index, high-pressure compression springs are carefully designed to work in small holes from 1/8 in (3.18 mm) to 1 in (25.40 mm). They are packed in a range of free lengths, starting at 0.250 in (6.35 mm) up to 4 in (101.60 mm) and options of high load capacities rated to pressures of 300, 400, 500 and 600 lb2 for easy reference.
For more information, visit http://info.hotims.com/76516-413
PRODUCT BRIEFS
Pulser source meterThe 2601B-PULSE System SourceMeter 10μs Pulser/SMU instrument from Tektronix, Inc. (Beaverton, Ore.) integrates a high-speed current pulser with DC source and measurement functions in one instrument. The new system incorporates PulseMeter technology for sourcing current pulses as short as 10μsec at 10A and 10V without the need to manually tune the output to match device impedance up to 3μH. This is critical for minimizing device self-heating, which for optical devices, can result in erroneous mea-surements and the potential for damaging test equipment. The 2601B-PULSE also includes all current and voltage source measure unit (SMU) ranges that are available in Keithley’s standard Model 2601B System SourceMeter (40V, 3A DC, 10A Pulse). It can be applied to many uses and industries, but it is particularly fit for LIDAR innovation through the advancement of VCSEL testing.
For more information, visit http://info.hotims.com/76516-414
AUTOMOTIVE ENGINEERING June 2020 25
Advertiser Page Web LinkCoilcraft ................................................................18 ...............................................coilcraft.com
Create The Future Design Contest ......... Cover 3 ....................createthefuturecontest.com
EA Elektro-Automatik, Inc. ................................. 1 ........................www.elektroautomatik.us
Marubeni Citizen-Cincom Inc. ................Cover 4 .....................................www.marucit.com
Master Bond Inc. ..........................................23, 26 .............................www.masterbond.com
Röhm GmbH ........................................................ 3 ...................www.acrylite-polymers.com
SAE International ..............................................26 ....................................connection.sae.org
SFC KOENIG.........................................................10 ..................................www.sfckoenig.com
Smalley ................................................................. 9 .......... expert.smalley.com/SAE/Bearing
SPE Automotive Innovation Awards Gala ......15 ......................www.speautomotive.com/ innovation-awards-gala
Yura Corporation .................................................11 .................................. www.yuracorp.co.kr
AUTOMOTIVE ENGINEERING 26 June 2020
AD INDEX
COMPANIES MENTIONED
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Advanced Linear Devices .................................................................................................................................... 24Aisin .......................................................................................................................................................................... 9ALIO Industries ..................................................................................................................................................... 24Audi ......................................................................................................................................................................... 13Autocar ................................................................................................................................................................... 19Avery Dennison Performance Tapes ................................................................................................................. 22BMW ........................................................................................................................................................................ 13BorgWarner ........................................................................................................................................................... 23Cadillac .................................................................................................................................................................... 13Cascadia Motion ................................................................................................................................................... 23CHAdeMO Association ...........................................................................................................................................7CharIn E.V. ................................................................................................................................................................ 8Chevrolet ................................................................................................................................................................. 8China Electricity Council.........................................................................................................................................7Chinese National Committee of the International Organization for Standardization .................................7Cirrus Logic............................................................................................................................................................ 24Colorado School of Mines .................................................................................................................................... 19Covestro ...........................................................................................................................................................22, 28Cummins .................................................................................................................................................................. 8D3 Engineering ..................................................................................................................................................... 24Delorean ................................................................................................................................................................. 19Eaton ........................................................................................................................................................................ 9Ford ................................................................................................................................................................... 12, 19Freightliner .............................................................................................................................................................10General Motors ....................................................................................................................................................... 8GeneSys ................................................................................................................................................................. 25GMC .......................................................................................................................................................................... 8
GM Components Holdings .................................................................................................................................... 9Harbour Results Inc............................................................................................................................................... 12HELLA ..................................................................................................................................................................... 25Henkel .................................................................................................................................................................... 22IDRA Group ............................................................................................................................................................ 13International Electrotechnical Commission ........................................................................................................7Jacobs Vehicle Systems......................................................................................................................................... 9Kistler Group ......................................................................................................................................................... 22Lee Spring ............................................................................................................................................................. 25MESSRING ............................................................................................................................................................. 22Munro & Associates ............................................................................................................................................... 13nTopology ..............................................................................................................................................................20Porsche ...................................................................................................................................................................10POSCO ..................................................................................................................................................................... 17Power Integrations ............................................................................................................................................... 25RUETZ SYSTEM SOLUTIONS ............................................................................................................................... 23SAE International ..............................................................................................................................................8, 16Schaeffler................................................................................................................................................................. 9Southco .................................................................................................................................................................. 25Tata Steel Europe .................................................................................................................................................. 16Tektronix ................................................................................................................................................................ 25Tesla ................................................................................................................................................................... 12, 19Tokyo Electric Power Co. ........................................................................................................................................7Tula Technology...................................................................................................................................................... 8UL Japan Kashima EMC ..........................................................................................................................................7Vector ..................................................................................................................................................................... 23Vehico..................................................................................................................................................................... 22
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YOUR CONNECTION TO THE MOBILITY ENGINEERING COMMUNITY
The Member Connection is available exclusively to SAE members only at connection.sae.org.
ADVANCED JOINING AND MATERIALS TECHNOLOGIES FOR LIGHTWEIGHT VEHICLESThursday, June 25, 2020 at 12:00 pm U.S. EDT
For additional details and to register visit: www.sae.org/webcasts
UPCOMING WEBINARS
USING THE VIRTUAL PROTOTYPE OF THE S32G SAFE AND SECURE VEHICLE NETWORK PROCESSOR IN PRODUCTIONTuesday, June 30, 2020 at 12:00 pm U.S. EDT
For additional details and to register visit: www.sae.org/webcasts
The challenge with highly complex automotive devices is to bring up the software as soon as the silicon becomes available, which applies to the entire automotive ecosystem, including internal teams, software partners, and external customers. This 60-minute Webinar focuses on the production use of the NXP S32G274A virtual prototype for pre-silicon development, which consists of an Arm® Cortex®-A53 cluster with 4 cores, an Arm Cortex-M7 cluster with 3 lockstep cores, and automotive network accelerators with additional cores. The NXP S32G274A is an SoC for safe and secure vehicle applications.
Hosted by:
The rush to increase vehicle content of lightweight materials is demanding increasingly sophisticated techniques for joining non-traditional materials in non-traditional applications. In this Technical Webinar from the editors of SAE International, experts discuss the latest advances in material-joining practices and technology as well as which materials and joining techniques show the most promise for near-term success.
Frank BillottoAMS Market Manager,Transportation Assembly,DuPont Transportation & Industrial
Ben MeaigeSenior Engineer,Materials Research,Honda R&D Americas
Speakers:
Leslie Wolschleger, Ph.D.Vice President,Research & Development,Sika
Sponsored by:
Sponsored by:
Ștefan ThielSenior Business Development Manager,Synopsys
Manfred ThannerManager,NXP
Speakers:
Hosted by:
Q&A
AUTOMOTIVE ENGINEERING 28 June 2020
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New polycarbonates provide ‘sensor transparency’ enhance that to achieve higher purity, toward an AX [exterior polycarbonate family] or an Ai if it’s in the interior. But to have sensor transparency, you also must consider the base material and color combinations. Making something that looks simple and homogeneous can be challenging. Designers want their new dis-plays to appear ‘hidden until lit.’ They want a deep, glass-like, pia-no-black surface until it’s back-illuminated. Sometimes the items behind that surface are translucent, transparent, or opaque, re-quiring three different color matches to sustain a consistent sur-face appearance. In increases the materials complexity three-fold.
Our sensor-transparent polycarbonate grades are de-signed to be virtually opaque to the human eye, with the rich high-gloss finish, while they’re actually trans-parent to lidar’s 905- and 1550-nanometer wavelengths. This is where OEMs are headed now, in terms of hiding their sensor arrays. And located next to that lidar be-hind the front-end panel, you might have a headlamp whose light must shine through. And next to the hid-den headlamp you might have a micro-LED or OLED display. Those displays are offering increasing res-olution. The industry is taking tech-nology from consumer electronics and bringing it into automotive. Covestro’s approach is we want to work with customers on whatever route they take
Is the trend toward larger UX dis-plays in cabins driving more focus on greater polycarbonate acuity?Yes. Internally we talk about a three-dimensional surface that has radius of curvature in two directions, like a horse saddle. And those radii are get-ting tighter and tighter. That solution is viable in polycarbonate. It’s been part of our polycarbonate-windows discussion for a while. That kind of surface form factor is coming to both interior displays and to the large front-end panels of electric vehicles, as shown in concept by Mercedes, BMW and others. That surface is go-ing to have sensors and displays be-hind it — the exterior displays being used for differentiation and for pedes-trian protection.
The sensor arrays that currently reside on the roofs of devel-opment mules will be hidden from view on future production vehicles. But how to conceal them without affecting their safety-critical performance? This design and engineering challenge, along with the growing trend toward larger, multi-function interior and exterior displays, is driving new polycar-bonate solutions at Covestro, which was spun off from Bayer Materials Science in 2015. For insights into this new family of materials, editor Lindsay Brooke spoke with Paul Platte, a me-chanical engineer by training who now is part of Covestro’s marketing team.
The term ‘optical purity’ is used to describe requirements for advanced headlamp modules that incorporate forward-looking sensors. What’s your take on that? Optical purity of the sensor’s cover lens, or any surface that protects an optical sensor, is important for that sensor’s acuity. With lidar for exam-ple, as the emitted light passes through the cover lens and returns, any impurities in the material can de-grade the fidelity of the signal itself. We’re developing solutions to im-prove the purity of our polycarbonate materials, not only the grades but also the coloring systems.
Then you must validate it.Yes, and because it’s a safety-related item it requires more time to validate. Some developers who didn’t think they needed the higher-performance material have observed what I’ll call ‘application-level’ defects. Traditionally in automotive you start with the lower-cost materials and see if they work, and we’ve already had people who found that they really do need the more optically-pure polycar-bonates and come back to us with that request.
Exterior designers say integrating lidar into the bodywork is a looming challenge.For integrating lidar, we now have sen-sor-transparent grades of material. We have had our AL [automotive lens] grade used in headlamps for years. We
“New material grades that are virtually transparent to lidar’s wavelengths are where OEMs are headed now.”
Covestro’s Paul Platte
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