powertrain design
Bernie Rosenthal, CEO, Reaction Design
Reaction Design, San Diego, USA, enables both automotive manufacturers and energy companies to achieve their clean technology goals with software simulation tools, chemical models and consultancy.
Reaction Design has been providing computer simulation to the automotive energy and electronics market since 1997. Recently, we have been focusing on clean combustion. We offer a range of products for this sector, the main one being Chemkin
(chemical kinetics) developed originally by the US Department of Energy and Sandia National laboratories. After at least 70 years of mass production
of the internal combustion engine, there is more pressure than ever for better design. We see society demanding not only higher performance, but also cleaner performance and greater economy, especially when one considers OPEC’s pricing policies of late. At the same time, there are other design trends, such as car and engine downsizing and increasing hybridisation to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. Other innovations include pressure-based rather than spark ignition and recirculation of exhaust gases.
Kevin Ward, managing director, Cobham Technical Services
The Vector Field Software division of Cobham Technical Services is based in Kidlington, Oxfordshire. UK. It makes the Vector Fields Software electromagnetic design software suite Opera, which is widely used in automotive applications.
The numerous powertrain applications that we are involved with include: Hybrid drives (on the electric drive side of things – typically combinations of electric motors and generators) for both mainstream automotive design and in racing car design; and Magnetic gearing – another technology that is being looked at for automotive applications.
Opera has the capability to characterise hysteresis effects, which is critical for designers who are trying to get the maximum efficiency out of an electric motor-based drivetrain. A finite element simulation suite, Opera
is frequently used to design electric motors, including those for ‘hybrid’ vehicles. It includes advanced features, such as the ability to model magnetic hysteresis and the demagnetisation of permanent magnets. These features have been used to investigate novel devices, such as hysteresis brakes. The software can also be used for other automotive applications, such as the Kinetic Energy Recovery System (KERS). The use of electric drives and electrical
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to mechanical power conversion systems accounts for 70 per cent of the world’s power usage, so if designs can make a 10-20 per cent saving – such as through improved design, by effective simulation – that would be a very dramatic change to energy waste reduction. There is
considerable interest in producing more efficient, and ‘greener’ vehicles. The development of hybrid- electric cars
is one means of addressing this, with a number already on the market that have been developed
using conventional technology, for example permanent magnet electric drive motors. Today, a topical issue is the need for
electric motors to contain less rare-earth magnet material to cut costs and reduce environmental impact. There is, therefore, a requirement to develop electric motors that retain the high-efficiency of permanent magnet motors and that contain no, or only a small amount of, magnet material. Another key focus is designing and optimising hybrid vehicles.
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In the past 15 years, or so, it has been the enormous change in emissions regulations that have forced designers to significantly change their engine designs – a significantly different approach on traditional engine redevelopment processes, which were usually incremental. Now we are offering a new product, Forté
CFD, which we introduced earlier in 2011. The mechanisms for real fuel chemistry that can be used in Forté are backed by years of research within our industry- wide Model Fuels Consortium, which has extensively validated model predictions over the wide range of pressures, temperatures and equivalence ratios important for advanced designs. We argue that existing CFD simulation
packages cannot handle the complexity of real fuel models, but Forté’s technology simplifies and accelerates the chemistry calculations that are required to achieve unprecedented accuracy with time-to- solution metrics that fit in commercial- development timeframes.
Reaction Design comes at this issue from
a different angle to many other software developers. We look at an engine as a chemical plant – the equation of air plus fuel equals horsepower plus byproducts. When our clients want to do an engine redesign, they usually come up with three key issues: 1. Predicting the impact of new fuels on performance;
2. Optimising fuel nozzle orientation to ensure fuel combusts before hitting the cylinder wall; and
3. Accelerating the time to model.
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