Progress Through Freedom (1/3)

With the IM01, InMotion will show the world innovations in the field of automotive. Now, if one holds the desire to innovate, a glance into the past might be the best way to start…

America, at the end of the 1940’s. This was the ‘Atomic age’, a genuinely exciting time. As an American you would have seen the very first nuclear power plant go operational on the 20^th of December ’51 in Idaho. Just a year later, deHavilland introduced the Comet, the first commercial jet aircraft. Then, in 1957, the International Atomic Energy Agency was created, to stimulate nuclear research and reduce the threat of nuclear warfare.

In the same year, the Sputnik was sent into orbit, starting the ‘space race’ between Russia and the USA. Over the next decade America saw the rise of satellites and rockets. The grand finale came of course with the Apollo 11 mission, where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first men to set foot on the moon.

This is the mindset of a generation, and fueled by their achievements, their influence could be noted throughout the community. Especially in the American automobile industry. This is the first part in our three-piece special, aiming the spotlight at the innovations and innovators of the 1950’s and ‘60’s. For your convenience, the text in this series will be accompanied by the finest pictures we could find. This time we call for discussion. We want to know what you think. Which cars or novelties are the coolest? What is the most impressive new technology?

This first part is meant as a teaser. We already set the scene, now we will introduce the players. Much like the space race itself, the automotive concept scene at the time was lead by the two super-powers; Ford, and General Motors.

The ‘General Motors styling division’ was the first to ever release the ‘concept car’, a one-off vehicle by a major brand, made just to poll the public’s opinion. The Buick Y-Job, in 1939. The man who led the styling division was a former coachbuilder from Hollywood. Harley Earl. This is the man who authorized the first tailfins on a production vehicle. The Autorama shows, and the Chevrolet Corvette…  his idea’s. So this was the right man for the job. The GM styling division’s task description: “Study the question of art and color combinations in General Motors products.” Remember Henry Ford’s famous quote: “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants, so long as it is black.” The GM styling division was high tech, stylish and innovatory.

Ford had to keep up. This meant Ford had to adjust their view. So they needed something similar to the GM styling division. The ‘Ford advanced styling studio’ was created. The man behind it, or at least for the era we’re interested in, Alex Tremulis. He had an impressive resume, designing for Cord, Duesenberg, Chrysler, Packard, and briefly, GM’s styling division. And Ford had its mind set on creating even more impressive concepts than GM… “This car is quite obviously powered by some unknown propulsion system as yet undiscovered on Earth.  There is no doubt in our minds  that most of these designs can be readily refined and developed into successful automobiles.”

Next time we will introduce some of the most creative vehicles from the hands of these visionairies. For now, enjoy the gallery of selected highlights. And tell us which camp you are in… GM, or Ford?

If you would like to read more about either of the two, follow these links:
General Motors - Ford


For the innovations by InMotion, visit http://inmotion.tue.nl

The Heat Is On!

In our quest for the most efficient high performance race car ever, it is evident that the conversion of fuel into electric energy should be done as efficient as possible. Getting tremendous amounts of power out of an engine is not that difficult. Doing this efficient is the big challenge. And this challenge is accepted by the InMotion team!

One wants to waste as little energy that is available from the fuel, as possible. When fuel is combusted inside an engine, the chemical energy inside the fuel is converted to thermal energy, in other words, heat. Most 4-stroke engines these days are very good in converting that chemical energy into heat. But then comes the bigger challenge. After heat is produced, the thermal energy has to be converted into mechanical energy. In piston engines this is done by expanding the pressure  due to heating of the gasses inside the engine, by letting the pressure push a piston down. The force on the piston is transferred to the crankshaft, so in the end rotational mechanical energy is produced by the engine which is equal to the Brake Mean Effective Pressure (BMEP). During this process the biggest efficiency-killer of all internal combustion engines shows up: Heat loss. This is shown in the figure on the right.

Heat from the gasses is transferred to the materials of the engine. These materials have a limit in temperature, because they get weaker when getting hot and this could cause engine failure. Therefore the engine needs to be cooled. This cooling takes away the heat from the engine materials and transfers it to the air. This heat is extracted from the gasses and this lowers the pressure inside the engine. Therefore less energy is available to push the piston down. When the piston reaches its lowest position, the exhaust valves open. The temperature of the gasses is still way above the air temperature, so also here heat gets lost when the exhaust gasses are blown out of the engine.

This is all a lot of theoretical bladibla, but in normal internal combustion engines these heat losses come down to over 50% of the energy in the fuel. In other words, the internal combustion engine is better in being a stove than doing what it is designed to do. The aim for the InMotion team is at least to let the engine of the IM01 be better in what it is designed to do then being a stove.

Being able to let the engine run on a constant load facilitates our goal, but does not get us there entirely. Technologies that are currently under development to be able to covert more thermal energy into mechanical energy are Homogeneous Charge Combustion Ignition (HCCI) and Partially Premixed Combustion (PPC). PPC is a promising combustion principle for the IM01 engine with 56% efficiency test results. Major drawback of this principle is the low power-to-weight ratio. This means that for the same amount of output power, the engine weighs more. Off course this is not desirable in a full bred race car which has to be as lightweight as possible. One engine that is capable of covering this drawback is the Wankel engine.

These engines where banned from some race classes because of the major power-to-weight ratio advantage over piston engines. They were simply too fast for the competition. Together with new production techniques and materials InMotion is going to build the best engine that is up and running outside of a conditioned test facility. There are some major hurdles to take, but that is exactly what this team is good at. 

For more information about InMotion's research, visit http://inmotion.tue.nl

Howto: Overcome Bumpy Roads

For every bump on the road, for every different road surface, one actually wants to have a different tuned suspension to achieve maximum performance. The problem with a conventional design of a suspension is that it's tuned before use, and then it is fixed. The final set of parameters for your suspension setting is actually a trade-off between all your demands and therefore imperfect for any specific situation.

Most people who have ever seen a Formula 1 race will remember the cars sometimes ‘bounces’ over the curbstones. This is because the suspension is tuned for the flat road surface of the circuit itself, and not so much for driving over the curbstones. This bouncing is killing for the grip of the wheels and also has a negative impact on the aerodynamics of the car. For aerodynamics you want the car to stay as leveled as possible. This is impossible with a conventional design of the suspension. The forces on the vehicle are constantly changing, depending on the vehicle speed, whether the vehicle is accelerating or braking, taking a turn or driving straight etc. So to maintain a perfectly leveled vehicle, you want to tune your suspension real-time.

That’s why the benefits of active suspension are so great, you can change the parameters of your suspension real-time to achieve the optimal solution for practically every situation. 'Then why won’t they try this in the Formula 1?', one might ask. Well, they did. Lotus was the first team to experiment with this system in the mid-1980s, but couldn't get the advantages of the system to overcome the disadvantages (extra weight and power consumption). They only had some success at very bumpy street circuits.

In 1992 Williams decided not to build a new car for the upcoming season, but put an active suspension on the car from the previous season and used that car instead. This car completely crushed the competition! Differences in lap times of 2 seconds were no exceptions (which is a huge gap in Formula 1).

However, the general trend in Formula 1 is, when a technological invention causes the differences between the cars becoming too large, that invention will be banned. This also happened to the active suspension system, which was sadly banned form Formula 1 in 1993.

Now is this also applicably for your road car? The suspension of your road car is mostly tuned for comfort, but also for this purpose you can use active suspension. This is illustrated in the following video:

You now probably agree that the active suspension system has already proven its benefits, so now it’s up to us to bring it back to the roads. 

For more information about InMotion's research, visit http://inmotion.tue.nl

The Dark Side of Aerodynamics

It was not until the late 60's that aerodynamics really began to play a role in the automotive world. Before this, some assumptions were made and on rare occasions effort was put into reducing drag. This is not surprising, as the matter is hard to see. 

But this all changed as Chaparral came to the idea of exploiting an inverse airfoil (wing) of a plane to create negative lift (better known as downforce in the racing world), for his Le Mans car. This new form of using the air in his advantage gave a lot of extra performance and stability.

Through the aerodynamic pressure working downwards on the vehicle it gives extra grip and thereby makes it possible to go faster through corners, something the aeronautical world had exploited long before this to lift airplanes.

The effect of downforce in some classes of motor sport changed them more than ever. On the other hand the wings brought a great deal of extra drag along with them,  so more horse power is needed in order to reach high speeds. More horse power means more fuel consumption. The fine line between reducing drag and finding more downforce is what makes the difference between Formula 1 teams nowadays, the pinnacle of motor sport. In other words it’s a fine line between going faster through corners and going faster on the straights.

All of this is obviously not applicable for the common road cars if we speak in terms of speed. But jet again we can learn a lot from the aeronautical world, where they are pushing the boundaries more than ever, like they used to do in the Formula 1, and where InMotion wants to pick up the pace again.

Why should we make this trade-off between fast cornering and going faster on straights if we could morph the aerodynamic package to deliver the right conditions at the right time and thereby making a far more efficient car. Furthermore why shouldn't we use this research for exploiting the aerodynamic forces to deliver more and direct safety to passenger cars and make them more efficient to reduce our energy consumption.

InMotion wants to give back the times where the use of research done in motor sport is also used as cutting edge technologies for passenger cars. And from the aerodynamically point of view we want to do this in a smart way, with intelligent control systems that can adjust the angle of attack from an airfoil in milliseconds and thereby adjust to the needs form the position on the track.

In the future we also want to exploit other reaching areas like the possibilities of fully morphing panels and wings with the use of new materials, better controlling the boundary layers, and using more advanced and powerful computational fluid dynamics. In this last part there is yet a lot to gain as there is great research being done on new methods of applying the Navier-Stokes equations, and thereby making the computational times less, and the need for wind tunnel tests.

All in all aerodynamics is a huge field of research where lots of new technologies are yet to be discovered and large gains are still to be found.

Hope this blog has inspired you all and illuminated the dark side of aerodynamics a bit more although it will always be hard to see.

For more information about InMotion's research, visit http://inmotion.tue.nl

Developing the IM01!

It all started in March 2012. The idea of building a platform to demonstrate all high tech research all together in a single sexy showcase. InMotion was born. We believed that if you combine all this research you could build a series-hybrid car that outperforms a formula 1 car while being able to do this for 24hrs and in a clean way. But is this even possible? Is it technologically possible to beat a formula 1 car with an electric or hybrid racecar? This is where the PDEngs stepped in.

In their 2 year Post-Master study they are given various assignments on faculties spread on the campus of the TU. This way they have a lot more valuable project experience before entering industry. For their 3 month assignment at the Electromechanics and Power Electronics group (EPE) from Electrical Engineering they were given the task to research the topology of the IM01. So let’s find out some more about what they did!

Laptime simulation

On 4 Oct, that is last Thursday, they showed their results. Not to go too much into details they did some clever things though. One of these things is that they used google maps data including the elevation and even tire marks to create a digital track to do simulations on. With this digital track it is possible to simulate a lap around the Circuit de la Sarthe, best known for the 24Hr of Le Mans. Given a certain combination and sizing of electric motors, batteries, power convertors and a hot spot generator they could tell us a lap time and even after how many laps the car would need refueling.

Instead of the regular batteries, the IM01 will use supercaps. In more conventional words a large capacitor to store only the energy recuperated from regenerative braking. This means the car is able to drive for a very long time, without needing to replace battery packs. This is because supercaps have a very high power density opposed to for instance Lithium Polymer batteries which have a large energy density instead.

So with of-the-shelve components it is possible to reach a lap time of 2:55 on the Circuit de la Sarthe. That’s just 10 seconds slower than a Formula 1 car, with a hybrid-electric powertrain! Research at InMotion is in full progress to design more customized components to lower that laptime even more.

Special thanks go out to the 7 PDEng trainees (on the left), Prof Dr. E Lomonova, Aleksandar Borisavljevic (on the right), and Johan Paulides for this great project. This sets large steps in making the dream of InMotion reality!

Thanks for reading our blog posts and do not forget to visit our Website! http://inmotion.tue.nl/

Inside Information

After some interesting blog posts about technical stuff, it is now time to give you some inside information in the everyday proceedings at InMotion! What has happened in the mean time?

The team has recruited a couple of new team members; you can find them at our website (www.inmotion.tue.nl) where they explain their tasks in the team.  Because of these fresh recruits our old place became too small. Therefore, at the beginning of this month we moved to a new location. We received the key of a fine office space for ourselves. The office is located in the ‘Multi Media Paviljoen’, a building where several spin-off companies from the university are located.

A large number of people immediately (accidentally or not) walked into our new office and were curious about what this group of young people were up to. After a brief explanation and showing our models, they all were very enthusiastic about the project; the first meeting with the neighbors was a fact! After a number of these spontaneous visits, soon the idea of an ‘office warming’ was suggested. It will take place quickly enough! But first our office needs to be furnished.

Now, a few weeks later, we are already quite settled. Everyone has their place secured (sometimes literally). The desktops and laptops are installed and everyone has a nice place for its own. Two team member birthdays have been celebrated and the first team meetings have already taken place.

About these team meetings; quite some time of the first meetings has been spend on furnishing our crib. The place where the magic happens is already reasonably and well-furnished and we can get started, but... some people are still working to get the furnishing fit together, to make it a whole. For this, our initiator takes the initiative. The problem is that he will spend quite a lot of time to get what he wants, and he wants a lot! You can call it quite a lot of time when first a 3D model of the building is made after which also the furniture is modeled to get some idea about how to decorate the place… You can imagine that this takes some time. But nevertheless, in the Netherlands they say: "A good job needs time ', but then in Dutch of course…

Furthermore we went with our team to the Automechanika fair in Frankfurt, it began as an interesting hunt for potential partners, but ultimately it felt more like a fun team outing. The ’fun’ began with a 3.5 hour trip to Frankfurt. Every hour the initiator initiated a stop because of his back problems. This gave us the chance to have breakfast and lunch at the ‘yellow bows’ restaurants. 

After expanding our networks at the fair to the max, we went home, satisfied. Not only satisfied about our day but also in the knowledge that we are driving back at the German Autobahn: ‘Sie kӧnnen TAUSEND fahren!’

Thanks for reading our blog posts and do not forget to visit us some time at our new office! (http://inmotion.tue.nl/contact)

Software Challenges in Automotive

In 1978, General Motors used a Motorola 6802 CPU in the Cadillac Seville to calculate trip information (average speed\fuel usage\engine information). This is one of the first software controlled systems used within an automobile. The application calculating this information consisted of less than 10,000 lines of code. 

A few years later, the first software controlled engines were introduced. This software contained about 50,000 lines of code. Since the introduction of software solutions within automotive, the number as well as the size of these solutions grew exponentially.

These days, high end cars contain up to a hundred electronic control units running about a hundred million lines of code connected by multiple in-car computer networks. To emphasize the huge size of these solutions: the complete package of software controlling the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) contains about 5.7 million lines of code (almost a factor 20 less)! This shift from purely mechanical to electronic solutions introduced comfort and safety increasing functions on one hand, but on the other hand it made automobiles more complex to design, test and maintain.

What about security?

The control units running this software are connected via (unsecure) computer networks, enabling them to send messages across and thereby adjusting each other’s settings. Recent research has shown the vulnerability of these networks by taking over control of the speed dial and even more important, the car's brakes. Since these interventions require a physical connection to the network, at first this doesn’t sound as an important security issue. But, additional research has shown several ways to access this network. For example by adding software to a digital music file, which while being played by the car's audio system, gets access to the car's network. This attack still requires a user of the car to connect the file to the audio system, but these days downloading mp3-files from the internet and playing them in our cars is common practice.

Another way of gaining access to the network is, through the emerging communication interfaces in a car, for example Bluetooth interfaces and internet access enabling real time traffic information. Furthermore, there exist cars that can be controlled by smartphone apps enabling users to remotely open doors and start the car’s engine to preheat it before driving. These connections can be used to gain access to the car’s network and take over control of the car. If these vulnerabilities are exploited by malicious persons, harmful situation could occur. It is interesting to note that these security issues not only apply to the automotive industry, but also to for example power plants. In June 2010 Stuxnet (a computer virus) was spread, infecting PLCs of nuclear power plants.

Protection

To be able to protect our cars from similar attacks, it is important to take security issues into account while designing the architecture of the complete electronically system of a car. Using this approach, it will be possible to identify weaknesses during design time and resolve them. For example the interfaces that somehow enable remote access to the car’s network will need to have proper authentication systems and communication needs to be encrypted. This will help solving these security issues and thereby allowing users to securely enjoy nowadays multifunctional cars.