Archive for March, 2008

Clarity

Steve Meyer
March 30th, 2008.

A national talk-show host I listen to comments “I would rather have clarity than agreement”. I think that is a great platform for discussion. And I approach the blog with the same goal. This posting is an attempt to clarify my previous entry.

I got into the big debate on automobile technology in the 1980’s. It started with a duty cycle chart of engine horsepower and led me to join Unique Mobility in the late 80’s to try and help bring hybrid technology to the California low emission initiative. We were not successful. Primarily because none of the Big 3 automotive companies would agree to supply a vehicle platform for the drivetrain we developed. We did succeed in building a drivetrain for BMW’s EV-1 and EV-2 which were very successful steps along the way.

But the point of my earlier blog was simply to comment on “automobile technology” as the greatest mechatronic challenge of all. You can start with a simple F=ma approach and deal with how much mechanical power must be produced to move the vehicle, which the Big 3 have been messing around with for years. We have cars made out of plastic to reduce vehicle weight (the “m”) in an effort to get lower power solutions which mean more miles per gallon, you know the rest.

We have messed around with engine RPM producing higher speed engines with smaller displacements to get comparable horsepower with better miles per gallon. Various fuel injection schemes to stretch our gasoline dollar, fuel additives, etc. But while I am not an expert on emerging fuel technologies, it doesn’t seem to have gotten us very far. The national fleet average mileage hovers at 20mpg and hasn’t really changed in decades.

My point in mentioning the pneumatic and hydraulic approaches to solving the automobile “crisis” was not to advocate any of the proposed solutions, but simply to observe that there is more than one way to solve the problem. And in fact, that the US fleet of vehicle was historically evenly divided between steam, gasoline and electric. These are facts, not opinions. What is important to the topic of mechatronics is the diversity of solutions being proposed.

If you want to get into the “efficiency” discussion, you have to look at total system efficiency, and at component efficiency at the same time. The energy density of hydrogen is terrible, so you have to compare all the fuel candidates and their respective storage and conversion systems. Methanol reformers might be perfect for buses. Energy density of battery technologies is another huge area. Lead acid is simply too heavy, and in large part led to the demise of the GM EV-1 of the late 80’s. But that is not the point of this discussion.

What should be important to you and me as citizens is that the DOE has spent billions of dollars on “automobile technology” and the only low emission vehicles for sale in the US are made by Japanese manufacturers. Government bureaucracy has taken over large areas of engineering, and possibly because there is no criteria for performance, very little benefit is generated for the consumer/citizen. I have worked for companies that were DOE subcontractors and interviewed with NREL as a vehicle program manager, so its something I am a little familiar with.

The X Prize Foundation’s automotive competition puts this into focus. There are 60 companies, most of them American, who have filed letters of intent to submit working vehicle entries for the 100MPG equivalent goal of the program. The total program awards will be $10M, not the billions spend by the DOE, and none of the entries are from GM, Ford or Chrysler.

I will bet on good old American ingenuity in spite of the odds against them, and I hope I will be in a position to buy one of the products created by these gutsy, dare I say heroic, competitors in the near future.

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The Ultimate Challenge

Steve Meyer
March 23rd, 2008.

Mechatronics is a difficult term. It covers a lot of territory and is, as one comment mentions, almost meaningless because it is so broad. I think the term is mecha- due to the fact that every application is bounded by its mechanical design as a starting point. The -tronics is intended to capture the electronics element as either control or power, and sometimes both.

But mechatronics includes pneumatic and hydraulic systems, and basically anything that moves. And what moves Americans more than our cars? So I return to an earlier comment that the electric car is the Ultimate Mechatronic Challenge.

But it doesn’t have to be electric. Hydraulic systems have traditionally been the highest energy density for application of pure power. Anyone who has seen a back hoe in action realizes how well hydraulics work for high power. The EPA is partnering with Eaton and Peterbuilt to make a clean diesel-hydraulic hybrid that may end up as the fleet vehicle for UPS delivery. Double the mileage and drastically reduced emissions are just part of the package.

Even pneumatic cars have been built with some success. Check out Guy Negre’s MDI company in Luxembourg. Its a controversial solution, but the fact that the demo vehicle is built and running means they have reached a certain level of success. The 5 seater minivan runs 60 miles a day before air is needed, with a forecast selling price of $16,500.

The Th!nk electric is in test in Norway and the new model is expected sell for $30K with lithium batteries from A123 and 120 mile driving range. This would be a fabulous entry into the market if everything works as planned.

The latest effort by the X Prize Foundation is a $10M prize for the best car design that reaches 100mpg or equivalent. There are currently 60 companies with letters of intent to compete. This is where real innovation takes place.

So there are some interesting lessons to be considered;

The vehicle fleet in the US was evenly divided between electric, steam and fuel solution in the teens and twenties. This is because no single technology solution is the right answer for every situation. When Ford’s assembly line process brought the cost of the car down dramatically so that many people could afford it, Rockefeller made a deal to deliver low cost gasoline as the fuel. That’s part of how we got to where we are today. But the real point is we should have a lot of technology choices as consumers.

Mechatronics is never more challenging than when we look at the car as a portable system and try to figure out the best overall solution, balancing the power source, manufacturing cost and overall system efficiency.

Big companies rarely innovate. Ford and GM have lost major ground in the low emission race, putting America’s industry at risk. When you think of all the steel, glass and fabric that goes into a car, there is a lot more at stake that the assembly worker in Detroit.

Government continues to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on R&D that should be the responsibility of the private companies that stand to gain from these efforts. Given the track record of the last 30 years, its hard to argue that Government needs to be involved. I just hope our tax dollars are being spent wisely.

And lastly, the energy question which is a two-part; shouldn’t government’s regulatory role be to insure that oil and natural gas are readily available from domestic sources instead of finding every excuse why we can’t? And how many of our petro-dollars find their way to funding violent anti-American organizations?

Just some things to think about.

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Energy Policy

Steve Meyer
March 14th, 2008.

Americans have been focusing on energy reduction in this country for some time.  In an upcoming article to be published in Design World, I will detail some of the impact of national energy policy on how electric motors should be built, and how they should be used.  The main conclusion of the article from a technical perspective, is that the big energy savings come from control system solutions, not from incremental improvements in electric motors themselves, which the Department of Energy has spent a lot of money pursuing.

It is reasonable that the government concerns itself with how energy is used.  But what is appropriate for implementing policy?  Is it in the national interest to develop better washers and dryers?  better refrigerators? better air conditioning systems?  Or is this the domain of private enterprise?  Business that is for profit and normally makes the investment in product development sometimes gets a hand from government.

The car industry has received huge amounts of money to develop electric and hybrid electric cars for the US market for over 2o years.  Instead of delivering products, US carmakers have abdicated these niche products and today the major sales of hybrid cars are all Japanese.  US car makers are behind the curve and they don’t appear to be making a lot of progress in the direction of becoming serious suppliers.  The Chevy Volt might prove an exception if they can bring the car to production soon.

But energy policy is not exclusively about consumption, its about production.  Governments, primarily state, have regulated the power companies to the point that electricity is relatively scarce in some markets.   This forces the utility to pay people to use less power instead of investing in more capacity.

The same situation in the oil and gas industry.  No new drilling, fewer refineries, mean scarce gasoline supplies and increasing dependence on foreign supplies.

What happened to atomic energy?  The Europeans developed mini-reactors with cores the size of a waste paper basket.  Check out Popular Science back issues for articles on “Pebble Bed” reactors or archived video files on PBS where American representatives of the Nuclear Regulatory Comission sat in reactor control rooms while their German counterparts shut off coolant to the reactor.  These reactors are totally safe because the nuclear fuel is encapsulated in high temperature ceramic.  It can’t over heat and melt down, it can never go critical mass.  Best of all, you can put them in the cities where you need power, no grid and no grid losses.

Let’s rethink energy policy and look for the strategies that increase supply, and decrease system risks (like grid failures) so that we can grow our industry and employment and a stable economy.

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Medicine and Mechatronics

Steve Meyer
March 07th, 2008.

An interesting niche in the mechatronic world is the laboratory automation market.  Applications in this arena can be syringe dispensing of tiny volumes of fluids, automatic dispensing and sampling of chemicals, DNA processing and many other applications.   For the most part, the applications are Cartesian arrays of samples in small wells and single or multiple dispensing devices on a moving head.  The number of samples being managed can be anything from 1 to 96.

The motion is often powered with small stepping motors and a variety of mechanical solutions, some using timing belts and pulleys, some using lead screws, and some using rack and pinion acuation.   It doesn’t look terribly difficult, but the fact is that as throughput demands increase, the motion is much more difficult.  Components that are cantilevered tend to flex and oscillate which can disturb the accuracy of the motion or require settling time between motions.

There are no simple rules for the kinematics of these systems that will make them more efficient.  Next generation throughput is going come with some R&D and increased hardware costs.  And, next generation performance is going to require next generation design tools, which hopefully are on the near horizon.

The motion is not “mission critical” as it would be for a heart/lung machine or other system that involves risk to human life.  So conventional controls are acceptable.   But the emphasis of the equipment is the data that results from the processes.  So a lot of care is taken to insure that the right data is associated with the right sample.   A lot of money is spent on the PC software and hardware to make sure that the data is accurate.

The motion control aspect of this industry is not the primary focus of its engineering efforts.  Some companies are already experiencing limits in what the hardware can do.  So it remains, to get to the next performance plateau, we will need to throw out the handbook of how its been done up to now and start over with a clean sheet of paper.

As with most mechatronic applications, there has to be a change in the mechanical design of the system in order to achieve better throughput.  What that change is, is not immediately obvious or someone would already be doing it.  But that is how the progression takes place.

So we’ll stay involved in the industry and see how the next evolution takes place.

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E Drives Conference

Steve Meyer
March 02nd, 2008.

I was fortunate to attend the E Drives Conference In Atlanta Feb 14 & 15.  The show is an annual gathering of specialty companies involved in mechatronics.  The exhibits and lectures cover magnetic design tools, power electronic modules, control technology, feedback technology and gear reducers.  A lot of cutting edge conversations in the mechatronic world.

The design of motion control components is a difficult balancing act.  Component manufacturers must incorporate a lot of features and functionality in order to address the broadest portion of the market.  For the OEM machinery builder, this often means paying more for a product that exceeds the requirements of a particular application.

It has always been my opinion that most of the available motion control products are very expensive, so I am always on the lookout for technology that offers the potential to reduce price and deliver the right kind of performance.

Two companies at the conference have standout contributions to make.  One is Luminary Micro which makes high performance, low cost control chips.  They are making major inroads displacing the ubiquitous DSP with more processing capability and full Ethernet and Canbus communications  embedded in the same device.  Very cost effective.

The other is Novatorqu, a new company that has broken some performance barriers in the electric motor.   Novatorque’s President John Petro has re-invented the electric motor’s internal architecture making the DC brushless motor smaller, faster and a lot more efficient.  Did I mention lower cost?  Yes, lower cost too.  So much so, that they think they can take on the AC motor cost point in some applications with their technology.

I hope both of these companies will succeed in growing their respective markets and recovering some of the ground we have lost to foreign suppliers.

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