TM4 designs electric powertrains for the most demanding vehicle platforms and duty cycles on the road. Formed as a subsidiary of the public utility Hydro-Québec, the company sells its motor and control products to manufacturers of heavy-duty trucks and buses around the world. In June, TM4 will release an update to its SUMO product line… Read more »
Tuning a vehicle’s aerodynamic features is nothing new. Engineers have been using wind tunnels for decades, and more recently they’ve also employed computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software to reduce drag, minimize noise and increase stability by preventing undesired lift forces. In the expanding world of EVs, car builders are doubling down on efforts to push… Read more »
By Sam Abuelsamid, Senior Research Analyst – Navigant Research If you move, you will die. If you don’t move, you are already dead. There are countless variations on that theme but the gist is that life is full of risk and, sooner or later, it will get you. However, if you plan ahead and prepare,… Read more »
Wire bonding technology – widely utilized in the microelectronics and power electronics industries since the 1970s – is finding its way into interesting new applications in the growing EV industry – in particular, battery connections. We’re quite certain that a few EVs are using wire-bonding technology for production battery pack connections, but Charged was unable… Read more »
Torque vectoring technology is generally defined as a vehicle’s ability to vary the power to each wheel. Quickly controlling the torque applied to the wheels independently of one another allows the driving characteristics of a vehicle to be improved in significant ways – more stability, more responsiveness and more agility. A conventional differential distributes the… Read more »
The electrolytes in advanced batteries are based on incredibly complicated formulations. If you calculated all of the possible combinations of solvents, salts and additives while trying to find the optimal ratios for just one electrolyte formulation, it would add up to an extraordinary number of possibilities. Because it plays such a critical role in battery… Read more »
Spiers New Technologies (SNT) is just over a year old, but its founder has been focused on developing the market and technology for secondary-use batteries as long as anyone in the business. Dirk Spiers is one of the more passionate figures in the EV industry. Like many entrepreneurs, he seems to have a clear view… Read more »
Engineers use battery management systems (BMS) to prevent problems that occur in Li-ion batteries when they are over-charged or over-discharged, including premature capacity loss and thermal events. A BMS ensures precise control and keeps the individual cells balanced, which is critical to extracting the most useful energy from a pack. Fortunately for EV systems designers,… Read more »
It’s a common theme across the EV industry: Today many OEMs are designing their second- and third-generation EV platforms, and there is a strong push to increase packaging efficiency across the board, driving out every possible bit of cost. In the past few months, we’ve written about GM’s decision to attach the power electronics directly… Read more »
The principal motor engineer at Tesla describes why modeling and optimization is so vital to its design process. Creating a start-of-the-art electric vehicle requires a deep understanding of all the components. More importantly, it requires a continual process of analysis and optimization of the components to push the limits of driving range, efficiency, performance and… Read more »