NEWS EDITOR’S CHOICE HYDROGEN CAR DRIVES FOR EFFICIENCY WORLD RECORD AIDED BY BRITISH TORQUES SENSOR
The drivetrain consists of four DC motors that power the rear left wheel via a cardan shaft and custom- made gearbox. In order to decide it was
necessary to objectively assess and quantify the capabilities of the existing drive chain, so the first job was to design and built a suitable test rig. The students set out to identify the most
A
team of Dutch engineers competing to develop the world’s most efficient hydrogen fuelled car
has used a British torques sensor to determine that their next generation vehicle needs a custom designed and built hub motor. To measure the efficiency of the car's drivetrain,
Green Team Twente has built a bespoke test rig based on the TorqSense torque sensor made by British Sensor Technology Ltd. The team consists of staff and students from
two universities in the Netherlands, Saxion Hogeschool and the University of Twente. At the start of this academic year, there was an
important choice for the mechanical engineers in the team to make: could they gain more efficiency by further optimising the current drivetrain of the car, or should they move to another technique?
appropriate torque sensor and opted for the RWT 410-420 from long-time partner company Sensor Technology. With the rig, the students tested the angular
speed of the shaft and the actual torque generated. By measuring the input current and voltage of the motor controllers, they could determine the combined mechanical and electrical efficiency of the drivetrain. Varying the load on the motor with an eddy current brake simulates the conditions of a race. The power supply of the motor controllers and torque sensor can be read using the integral LabVIEW software. The input and output power, with the associated efficiency, can be digitally processed and stored with this software. With the test setup, the team measured the
efficiency of the drivetrain at as many points as possible. The team then derived the three- dimensional efficiency curve by fitting the measured points. The conditions under which the tests were conducted are based on data from previous car races, such as the Shell Eco Marathon 2019, and the Drivers’ World Championship 2019. After experimentally determining the efficiency,
the students can compare the ideal theoretical model with the experimental data. The tests showed that the drivetrain performed
many times better in theory than in practice, and therefore there was room for improvement. However, the team also had to consider the mechanical limits of the motor, which cannot be redesigned within the current system. Based on the test, the team looked for
alternatives, and made simulations of different alternatives. Ultimately, the choice was made to develop a new hub motor, in which the optimum efficiency is geared to the desired range. “After the new motor has been developed and
the controller has been tuned to it, the efficiency of the motor can be tested in practice,” explains team manager Tony Kouzelis. “Then we can compare the test results with the old drivetrain to see how much efficiency is improving with the new drivetrain. As such this is a another significant step in our on-going objective of developing the world's most fuel efficient car.”
www.sensors.co.uk
LATTICE SRELEASES ENTRY SOLUTIONS STACK AND SUPPLYGUARD SERVICE FOR SECURITY NEEDS According to Patrick Moorhead, president and founder of Moor Insights
& Strategy, “5G, Edge computing, and IoT are accelerating the pace at which devices are becoming connected, and security concerns are on the rise among high-tech OEMs serving every market. Developers need to know their hardware platforms are secured against cyberattack and IP theft. They need security solutions that support comprehensive protection throughout a product’s entire operating life in the field, which means the solution must be able to dynamically adapt to an evolving threat landscape.” “The Lattice Sentry solutions stack makes it easy for customers to
Lattice Semiconductor Corporation has launched its Sentry solutions stack and the SupplyGuard supply chain protection service. The Sentry stack combines customisable embedded software, reference designs, IP, and development tools to accelerate the implementation of secure systems compliant with NIST Platform Firmware Resiliency (PFR) Guidelines (NIST SP-800-193). The company’s SupplyGuard service extends the system protection provided by the Sentry stack throughout today’s challenging and rapidly changing supply chain by delivering factory-locked devices to protect them from attacks like cloning and malware insertion, and enables secure device ownership transfer. These hardware security solutions are increasingly important to a range of applications, including communications, datacenter, industrial, automotive, aerospace, and client computing.
8 JULY/AUGUST 2020 | ELECTRONICS
implement a hardware Root-of-Trust (RoT)-based PFR solution compliant with the NIST SP-800-193 guidelines,” said Deepak Boppana, Sr. Director, Segments and Solutions Marketing, Lattice. “With Sentry’s validated IPs, pre-verified reference designs, and hardware demos, developers can quickly customise the PFR solution by modifying the C code provided with the RISC-V and Propel design environment to cut time-to-market from ten months to just six weeks.” The security paradigm is changing, and firmware is an increasingly
popular attack vector. The National Vulnerability Database reported that between 2016 and 2019 the number of firmware vulnerabilities grew over 700 percent. Protecting systems against unauthorised firmware access requires dynamic, persistent, real-time hardware platform security for all connected devices. This includes securing component firmware from unauthorised access and enabling the system to automatically protect, detect, and recover from an attack in an instant. TPM and MCU-based hardware security solutions use serial processing and cannot deliver the real-time performance that parallel processing solutions like FPGAs can.”
www.latticesemi.com
/ ELECTRONICS
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