CHARGED Electric Vehicles Magazine - Iss 13 APR 2014

ELECTRIC VEHICLES MAGAZINE

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ISSUE 13 | APRIL 2014 | CHARGEDEVS.COM

Fuel WILL NISSAN’S NO CHARGE TO CHARGE PROGRAM DRIVE LEAF SALES? P. 40

A CLOSER LOOK AT SEMICONDUCTOR SWITCHES P. 16

PHINERGY’S ALUMINUM-AIR BATTERIES P. 26

BC HYDRO’S FAST CHARGER ROLLOUT P. 48

400 MPH: THE BUCKEYE BULLET P. 78

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THE TECH CONTENTS

16

16

Semiconductor switches A closer look at the critical power electronics components

22 Metal fluoride cathodes The quest for next gen batteries

26 The alloyed powers

Aluminum-air batteries from Phinergy and Alcoa

26

current events 8

ORNL team describes a bi-functional electrolyte Toyota develops free-piston engine linear generator

13

9

UQM and Kinetics present integrated motor/transmission

12

Arbin develops high rate discharge battery tester Battery sensor combines functions into one package

13

MotorBrain shows compact motor system, no rare earths

14

Daimler acquires two key German battery firms FEV exhibits transmission designed for PHEVs

14

15

$16 billion in DOE loans still available for auto suppliers

40

40 Free fuel

Will Nissan’s No Charge to Charge program drive sales?

48

48 BC Hydro DCFC rollout The British Columbian energy giant partners with local governments to speed things up

34

35 WiTricity licenses wireless charging patents to TDK Nissan offers multi-standard DCFC in Germany

35

Northumberland deploys 20 multi-standard chargers

37

Hybricon demonstrates ultrafast overhead rail charging

39

Honda’s Smart Home stores solar energy for Fit EV

37

THE VEHICLES CONTENTS

62

62 Q&A with Ian Wright The CEO of Wrightspeed on Tesla, gas turbines and electric trucks

72 Fleet sweet spot

Echo Automotive’s plug-in hybrid system

78 The Buckeye Bullet Land speed racing record holders from Ohio State University

78

90 BMW i3

Out of the gate running

current events

90

56

Historic Belgian brand reborn as electric superbike VW’s Chinese plans include plenty of plug-ins

57

FTC officials: States should allow Tesla direct sales

58

DOE funding Zero Emission Cargo Transport projects First two BYD buses roll off US production line

57

61

Croatian electric supercar startup secures funding

Publisher’s Note The leaders and the misleaders Recently, while browsing a national news web site, I noticed a troubling banner ad.

The animated advertisement opens with an image of a charging station that closely resembles an AeroVironment (AV) DC fast charger. The image pans out to reveal the words “Reserved for someone with four hours to kill.” Then a picture of a slicklooking Lexus hybrid appears with the slogan “No charging means more driving.”

Two misleading sentiments wrapped into one little banner ad - very disappointing to see from Toyota’s luxury division, once the leader of electrification.

First of all, anyone who’s ever seen an AV fast charger would know that this image was designed to resemble one.

The problem is, it takes 20 to 30 minutes (not four hours) to fully charge any EV that is compatible with AV’s charger.

Only after clicking on the advertisement are we whisked away to Lexus’s website, where (after scrolling down a bit and clicking the play button on a promotional video) we’re briefly shown the fine print - four-hour charging time represents that of a “typically available 240 V” Level 2 charging station.

The other disingenuous notion is that plug-in vehicle owners are regularly waiting around for a charging session to complete. Most EV owners (not to mention plug-in hybrid owners) seldom stop at public charging stations. Many independent studies have shown that the majority of charging happens at home (while sleeping) or at work. There is no “killing time” involved. Also, owners love these cars - customer satisfaction survey results are off the charts. No one is inconvenienced by the experience.

Certainly, there are many consumers today who don’t want to be bothered with plugging in their cars. I personally know a few who drive Toyota hybrids for that very reason. However, they didn’t need to see a misleading attack ad to come to that conclusion.

The electrification spectrum can be confusing for those who don’t pay close attention, and the media does a fine job of muddying the waters. If you must pit hybrids against plug-ins and point out that some chargers can take four hours, at least use an image that clearly represents a Level 2 charging station instead of one that clearly represents a DC fast charger.

EVs are here. Try to keep up.

Christian Ruoff Publisher

ETHICS STATEMENT AND COVERAGE POLICY AS THE LEADING EV INDUSTRY PUBLICATION, CHARGED ELECTRIC VEHICLES MAGAZINE OFTEN COVERS, AND ACCEPTS CONTRIBUTIONS FROM, COMPANIES THAT ADVERTISE IN OUR MEDIA PORTFOLIO. HOWEVER, THE CONTENT WE CHOOSE TO PUBLISH PASSES ONLY TWO TESTS: (1)TO THE BEST OF OUR KNOWLEDGE THE INFORMATION IS ACCURATE, AND (2) IT MEETS THE INTERESTS OF OUR READERSHIP. WE DO NOT ACCEPT PAYMENT FOR EDITORIAL CONTENT, AND THE OPINIONS EXPRESSED BY OUR EDITORS AND WRITERS ARE IN NO WAY AFFECTED BY A COMPANY’S PAST, CURRENT, OR POTENTIAL ADVERTISEMENTS. FURTHERMORE, WE OFTEN ACCEPT ARTICLES AUTHORED BY “INDUSTRY INSIDERS,” IN WHICH CASE THE AUTHOR’S CURRENT EMPLOYMENT, OR RELATIONSHIP TO THE EV INDUSTRY, IS CLEARLY CITED. IF YOU DISAGREE WITH ANY OPINION EXPRESSED IN THE CHARGED MEDIA PORTFOLIO AND/OR WISH TO WRITE ABOUT YOUR PARTICULAR VIEW OF THE INDUSTRY, PLEASE CONTACT US AT CONTENT@CHARGEDEVS.COM. CHARGED ELECTRIC VEHICLES MAGAZINE IS PUBLISHED BY ISENTROPIC MEDIA. COPYRIGHT © 2014 BY ISENTROPIC MEDIA. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. REPRINTING IN WHOLE OR PART IS FORBIDDEN EXPECT BY PERMISSION OF ISENTROPIC MEDIA. MAILING LIST: WE MAKE A PORTION OF OUR MAILING LIST AVAILABLE TO REPUTABLE FIRMS. IF YOU PREFER THAT WE DO NOT INCLUDE YOUR NAME, PLEASE WRITE US AT CHARGED - ELECTRIC VEHICLES MAGAZINE, ATTN: PRIVACY DEPARTMENT, PO BOX 13074, SAINT PETERSBURG, FL 33733. POSTMASTER: SEND ADDRESS CHANGES TO CHARGED - ELECTRIC VEHICLES MAGAZINE, ATTN: SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES, PO BOX 13074, SAINT PETERSBURG, FL 33733. SUBSCRIPTION RATES: $29.95 FOR 1 YEAR (6 ISSUES). PLEASE ADD $10.00 FOR CANADIAN ADDRESSES AND $36.00 FOR ALL OTHER INTERNATIONAL ADDRESSES. ADVERTISING: TO INQUIRE ABOUT ADVERTISING AND SPONSORSHIP OPPORTUNITIES PLEASE CONTACT US AT +1-727-258-7867. PRINTED IN THE USA.

Christian Ruoff Publisher Laurel Zimmer Associate Publisher Charles Morris Senior Editor Markkus Rovito Associate Editor Jeffrey Jenkins Technology Editor Joey Stetter Contributing Editor Nick Sirotich Illustrator & Designer Nate Greco Contributing Artist Contributing Writers Jeffrey Jenkins Michael Kent Charles Morris Markkus Rovito Christian Ruoff Joey Stetter Contributing Photographers Alsteele Thomas Lok John Maushammer MoDOT Photos MTAPhotos Pestoverd WSDOT Cover Image Courtesy of Nissan Special Thanks to Kelly Ruoff Sebastien Bourgeois For Letters to the Editor, Article Submissions, & Advertising Inquiries Contact Info@ChargedEVs.com

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CURRENTevents

Photo courtesy of Toyota Central R&D Labs

Toyota develops free-piston engine linear generator ORNL team describes a bi-functional electrolyte Researchers at the DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have developed a unique battery chemistry that promises to greatly extend battery life by making the electrolyte serve two functions.

In a study, Pushing the Theoretical Limit of LiCFx Batteries: A Tale of Bi-functional Electrolyte, which was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, ORNL researchers described an electrolyte that serves not only as an ion conductor, but also as a cathode supplement. This cooperative chemistry, enabled by the use of an ORNL-developed solid electrolyte, delivers an extra boost to the battery’s capacity and extends the lifespan of the device.

“This bi-functional electrolyte revolutionizes the concept of conventional batteries and opens a new avenue for the design of batteries with unprecedented energy density,” said ORNL’s Chengdu Liang.

The team demonstrated the concept in a lithium carbon fluoride battery. When the researchers incorporated a solid lithium thiophosphate electrolyte, the battery generated a 26 percent higher capacity than what its theoretical maximum would be if each component acted independently. The increase, explained Liang, is caused by the cooperative interactions between the electrolyte and cathode.

“As the battery discharges, it generates a lithium fluoride salt that further catalyzes the electrochemical activity of the electrolyte,” Liang said. “This relationship converts the electrolyte – conventionally an inactive component in capacity – to an active one.”

The improvement in capacity could translate into years or even decades of extra life, depending on how the battery is engineered and used.

8

A team at Toyota Central R&D Labs is developing a prototype free piston engine linear generator (FPEG). GreenCarCongress.com reported Toyota’s description of the FPEG at the recent SAE 2014 World Congress in Detroit.

Unlike a traditional ICE, which propels a drive shaft, the FPEG is designed to generate electricity directly. It consists of a two-stroke combustion chamber, a linear generator and a gas spring chamber. The piston is moved by the combustion gas, while magnets attached to the piston move within a linear coil, converting kinetic energy to electrical energy.

The Toyota FPEG is based on a double piston system - at one end is the combustion chamber, and at the other, an adjustable gas spring chamber, which is responsible for returning the piston for the subsequent combustion event.

A portion of the kinetic energy of the piston is stored in the gas spring, and extracted on the return stroke to the combustion chamber side. A magnetic “mover” is mounted at the outer periphery of the piston. The linear generator is a permanently excited synchronous machine consisting of the stationary coil, the mover (based on neodymium-iron-boron magnets) attached to the piston, and an iron-core stator. The researchers achieved output power of 10 kW with 42 percent thermal efficiency.

Toyota envisions that a pair of such units (20 kW) would enable B/C-segment electric drive vehicles to cruise at 75 mph. The prototype achieved stable operation for more than four hours without any cooling and lubricating problems.

THE TECH

UQM Technologies and Kinetics Drive Solutions are collaborating to offer an integrated electric motor and multispeed transmission system for commercial vehicles.

The new system features UQM PowerPhase HD electric motors and controllers combined with Kinetics NexDrive transmissions. By providing a fully integrated and calibrated system, UQM hopes to offer customers quicker speed to market, reduced development time and cost, and fewer engineering variables.

UQM’s PowerPhase HD family of motors and controllers was developed specifically for commercial vehicle applications, and includes the HD 220 with 700 Nm of peak torque and 220 kW of peak power; the HD 950T with 950 Nm of torque and 140 kW of peak power; and the HD 250, a high-voltage variant with 250 kW of peak power and 900 Nm of torque.

Kinetics’ NexDrive EV3-850 transmission, which was developed specifically for medium- and heavy-duty EVs, is a 3-speed dual-clutch transmission that’s designed to

Photo courtesy of UQM Technologies

UQM and Kinetics present integrated motor/transmission

work with the motor to minimize torque interruption during gear shifting, and to enable the motor to operate at near peak efficiency.

“As we work with multiple partners in China and other regions of the world, it has become clear that for some the ability to offer a complete system will be a competitive advantage. By collaborating with Kinetics we are able to offer those customers a proven powertrain system,” said UQM CEO Eric R. Ridenour.

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CURRENTevents

Image courtesy of Arbin Instruments

Arbin develops high rate discharge battery tester

Arbin Instruments has developed a new series of high rate discharge testers (HRDT) for performing cold cranking discharge profiles.

The need for automotive battery test equipment has continued to grow with the increasing demand for high power-density batteries.

Arbin’s new system provides the circuitry required for high-rate discharge testing and the ability to add charge current to maintain proper control over the device being tested. Users can define custom and standardized discharge test profiles for any testing application.

The company designed several standard models ranging from tens to hundreds of kilowatts. Test equipment can be customized with a range of voltage and current specifications, including optional features to monitor cell temperature, voltage, pressure, and other parameters.

12

Freescale Semiconductor has announced a new battery sensor that it says is the first to combine three measurement channels, a 16/32-bit MCU, and a CAN protocol module in a single package.

The MM9Z1J638 battery sensor measures key battery parameters for monitoring state of health (SOH), state of charge (SOC) and state of function (SOF) for early failure prediction. A flexible four-cell front-end architecture supports conventional 12 V lead-acid batteries as well as emerging battery applications such as 14 V stacked cell Li-ion.

Freescale points out that new automotive technologies, such as start-stop functionality, regenerative braking and intelligent alternator control, are creating demand for more precise sensing of the battery’s state to provide early failure warnings.

“Our introduction of the industry’s first singlepackage, automotive-qualified intelligent battery sensor with MCU and CAN components will help automakers cope with increasing algorithm complexity and data communication demands as cars become more connected and intelligent,” said Freescale Senior VP James Bates. “The new MM9Z1J638 battery sensor helps to support vehicle reliability even as automotive electrical system complexities increase.” Features of the MM9Z1J638 include: • 16/32 bit MCU, 128 K Flash, 8 K RAM, 4 K EEPROM • Integrated CAN protocol module • 3x 16-bit ADC for current, voltage and temperature • Support for up to four cells and up to 52 V inputs • Configurable hardware filters • Robust LIN physical layer • 7 x 7 mm 48-pin QFN package

Image courtesy of Freescale Semiconductor

Battery sensor combines functions into one package

THE TECH

The European MotorBrain project has presented a prototype of a lightweight electric motor system that integrates the motor, gear drive and inverter, and requires no rare earth metals.

The prototype motor system is three quarters the size of models from the beginning of the project in 2011, and, at less than 77 kg (170 lbs), is also approximately 15 percent lighter.

Rare earth metals are prized for their strong and constant magnetic fields. However, they are expensive, and obtaining them can be environmentally harmful. The MotorBrain electric motor uses readily available and less-expensive ferrite magnets. A specially developed high-RPM rotor compensates for the lower performance level of ferrite magnets compared to those with rare earth metals.

Photo courtesy of MotorBrain

MotorBrain shows compact motor system, no rare earths

The three-year MotorBrain project, which has a goal of increasing the range and safety of EVs, is one of Europe’s largest electromobility research projects. Led by Infineon, the team consists of 30 partners from nine countries, including universities, research facilities, OEMs, component suppliers and semiconductor manufacturers. The project has a budget of some €36 million ($50 million).

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Daimler has agreed to acquire Evonik’s shares of Li-Tec Battery GmbH and Deutsche ACCUmotive GmbH, making Daimler the sole owner of the two companies.

In recent years, Daimler and Evonik have worked together to develop industrial series production of lithium-ion battery cells for EVs. The two companies produce the batteries used in the current model of the smart fortwo electric drive (the previous generation used batteries from Tesla), which is selling well in Germany, with a market share of about 30 percent of EVs sold.

“Along the value chain for drive-system batteries with lithium-ion technology, we now have the two most important components: the production of battery cells and the related development and production of highly complex drive-system batteries as a combination of cells and battery electronics,” said Harald Kröger, Head of Development at MercedesBenz Cars Electrics/Electronics.

Li-Tec Battery, based in Kamenz (near Dresden) develops, produces and distributes large lithium-ion battery cells. Li-Tec’s CERIO cells feature Evonik’s ceramic SEPARION separator and LITARION electrodes. The company is also targeting stationary and grid applications.

Deutsche ACCUmotive, established in 2009 as a joint venture, made Daimler one of the few automobile manufacturers to develop batteries and to produce them in Germany, starting in 2012. The company has two production plants in Kamenz and a headquarters and R&D department in Kirchheim, near Stuttgart.

14

Image courtesy of Li-Tec Battery GmbH

Daimler acquires two key German battery firms

FEV exhibited a new transmission specially designed for plug-in hybrid powertrains at the 2014 SAE World Congress in Detroit.

According to FEV, engine downsizing for increased fuel efficiency has led to challenges for transmission developers, who must provide higher levels of capability in a smaller package. The company took a “clean sheet approach” to develop a transmission that meets these requirements.

The new transmission’s capabilities include two-speed pure electric driving mode, use as an ICE range extender in parallel mode, and a flexible eCVT (power split) mode. The transmission does not use a torque converter, and includes only one electric machine.

FEV says its new tranny is 10 percent lighter, shorter and less costly to manufacture than a similar dual-clutch transmission. It is designed to be package-neutral and robust with a low level of complexity.

FEV’s design process incorporated TCU software that was developed in-house; calibration was optimized using the company’s proprietary TOPexpert tool chain. Testing included putting the transmission through FEV’s extreme “Nurburgring” test cycle for sports car performance.

Features of the new transmission include: • Electric drive mode with two ratios • Full hybrid functionality including e-boost and regen • Creep behavior similar to conventional automatic transmissions • High fuel economy enabled by elimination of torque converter and a highly efficient parallel mode of operation

Photo © CHARGED Electric Vehicles

FEV exhibits transmission designed for PHEVs

THE TECH

The DOE is encouraging auto suppliers to step forward for a share of $16 billion in low-interest financing that’s still available under the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing (ATVM) loan program.

Congress created the ATVM program in 2007, and it famously lent about $8.4 billion to Ford, Nissan, Tesla and Fisker. Although the program hasn’t approved a loan since March 2011, it is not dormant, and suppliers have always been eligible. As the DOE’s Peter Davidson told Automotive News, “We are open for business.”

The program is being overhauled to make it easier to fund production of technologies such as lightweight materials, efficient engines and low-friction tires.

Changes include legal clarifications to show that suppliers are eligible for the program, a promise to respond more quickly to applicants and the creation of a new online application portal.

“The US auto industry has evolved since the ATVM program was established,” said Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz. “Today we are presented with an opportunity

to hit the accelerator on US auto manufacturing growth.”

To qualify for a loan, a company needs to contribute to vehicles that are 25 percent more efficient than equivalent vehicles made in 2005.

Roland Hwang of the Natural Resources Defense Council said environmental advocates used to worry that suppliers would receive funding for parts that were used to make cars more powerful, rather than more efficient, but now that stricter fuel economy standards are in place, that’s less of a concern.

“We’re increasingly seeing suppliers shoulder a heavier burden in meeting these new fuel economy standards,” Hwang said. “They’re facing increasing demand for these components and bottleneck situations in terms of their capacity. Focusing on suppliers seems like a very appropriate use for this program.”

Image courtesy of International Information Program (IIP)/Flickr

$16 billion in DOE loans still available for auto suppliers

The

Semiconductor

Switch

By Jeffrey Jenkins - Charged Technical Editor, power electronics guru, and Chief Electron Herder for Evnetics

I

n this article I’ll be giving an overview of that most important of power electronics components: the semiconductor switch. I’ll first address what a switch is, and then delve into some of the more important compromises and shortcomings that exist in real-world switches that engineers must contend with when designing chargers, motor controllers, DC-DC converters or any other type of switch-mode power converter.

If you are at all familiar with electronics, then you probably know that transistors can function as either amplifiers or switches, but diodes (or, more specifically, rectifiers, though I tend to use the terms interchangeably) are switches, too. The main difference is that you can’t control when a rectifier switches - it will automatically allow current to flow whenever its anode is more positive than its cathode - whereas you have to tell the transistor when to switch (though the polarity of the applied voltage is also important, as it is with the rectifier).

16

Image courtesy of John Maushammer/Flickr

THE TECH

A Silicon Diode On the right side is the anode. The cathode is on the left, marked with a black band. A square silicon crystal can be seen between the two leads.

Rectifiers/diodes We’ll begin with rectifiers/diodes, both because they are verse voltage and with less leakage current than Schottky simpler devices, but also because transistors are almost diodes (especially at higher temperatures), but they will always paired with diodes in switch-mode power conver- also exhibit a higher forward voltage drop and take a sion circuits. Both devices are fabricated from a semifinite amount of time to go from conducting current in conductor - usually silicon - in which specific impurities the forward direction to blocking current in the reverse have been introduced to direction (the so-called “reeither result in an excess of The main difference is that you can’t verse recovery time”). negative charge carriers (i.e.

Schottky diodes are control when a rectifier switches - it electrons) for “n” type, or constructed from a single will automatically allow current to of positive charge carriers semiconductor layer (usually flow whenever its anode is more (called “holes”) for “p” type. n type) upon which a metallic positive than its cathode.

Diodes are formed whenever layer is deposited to form the two different layers meet, and other electrode, and thus are said layers can either be an n and a p semiconductor in strictly “majority carrier” devices (which is another way the conventional or “junction” diode, or just an n (or, of saying that only one type of semiconductor is used to more rarely, just a p) semiconductor and a metallic conconduct current). Since no recombination of minority tact in the “Schottky” diode. As you might suspect, there carriers has to occur, there is no delay in switching from are advantages and disadvantages to both constructions. on to off. Also, the forward voltage tends to be lower as Generally speaking, junction diodes can block higher rea result of there being less semiconductor present (after

APR 2014 17

18

Image courtesy of alsteele/Flickr

all, the very name “semiconductor” implies less conductivity than a conductor-like metal). The primary downsides of the Schottky construction are much higher capacitance (which can mimic the effect of slow reverse recovery), a limited ability to block reverse voltage, and a higher leakage current for a given reverse voltage. One recent, but prominent, exception is the Silicon Carbide (SiC) Schottky. SiC has a “wide bandgap,” which basically means it takes more electrical “force” to move an electron across the semiconductor. Regular silicon has a bandgap of ~1.1 electron-volt (eV) while SiC has a bandgap of ~3.2 eV. In other words, a SiC diode can block ~3x the voltage for a given die thickness, and since SiC also has a higher thermal conductivity and can tolerate a higher operating A Power MOSFET temperature, it can handle a lot more Made by Fairchild Semiconductor current for a given die area, as well. Of course, TANSTAAFL1 applies, and SiC diodes (and MOSFETs) are significantly more difficult to fabricate, and therefore cost a lot more, but their unique advantages in low-voltage and/ There are several often eliminate the need for costly (and bulky) snubbers or high-switching key differences or larger heat sinks, so the overall design can end up cost- frequency applicabetween IGBTs and ing less while delivering better performance and taking tions because they MOSFETs that exert up less space.

- like Schottky diodes a profound influence - are majority carrier on which device is Transistors devices and thus can most appropriate for Among the various types of transistor, the two types switch very rapidly. a given application. most commonly used in EVs are the Metal Oxide Field But at the same time Effect Transistor (MOSFET) and the Insulated Gate the lack of assistance Bipolar Transistor (IGBT). These two devices share many from minority carriers means conduction losses increase characteristics and can even be used interchangeably at rapidly with blocking voltage (approximately a square times, but there are several key differences between them function). In contrast, IGBTs are preferred at higher that exert a profound influence on which device is most voltage/higher power applications where a high switchappropriate for a given application. ing frequency is neither desirable nor practical because Conventional wisdom is that MOSFETs are preferred they use both majority and minority carriers (i.e. both electrons and “holes”) to conduct current and thus can handle much more current for a given die area. But 1 - TANSTAAFL stands for There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free the need to recombine the minority carriers at turn-off Lunch, another way of stating the 1st law of thermodynamics that results in a much longer turn-off time and thus limits the is attributed to Robert A. Heinlein in his 1966 novel, “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”. practical switching frequency.

Image courtesy of Thomas Lok/Flickr

THE TECH

An IGBT Module Made by Mitsubishi Electric

The conventional wisdom is that IGBTs are preferred at higher voltage/ higher power applications where a high switching frequency is neither desirable nor practical.

The conventional wisdom oversimplifies things a bit, but the broad distinction between the two technologies holds true (even factoring in the higher blocking voltage capability of the new SiC MOSFETs). This is best illustrated by comparing the specs of an actual MOSFET and IGBT selected from an online parts distributor catalog, sorting by increasing resistance for the MOSFET and increasing forward voltage for the IGBT, and then picking the first device in each list. Both devices will be rated for 600 V and come in a common TO-247 plastic package, whose maximum dissipation will be limited to 60 W, as that is about the most heat this package can shed without resorting to exotic cooling measures (big nota bene here - don’t expect the leads on

a TO-247 package to carry more than 50-55 A, regardless of how effective the heat sink is; those current ratings that claim over 100 A are more intended to reflect a low forward voltage drop or on-state resistance).

The MOSFET with the lowest on-state resistance at the time of the sorting is Fairchild part number FCH76N60N, which costs about $26 in single quantities. It has a typical on-state resistance of 28 mΩ at 25 C, but that rises with temperature to 38 mΩ, so it’s good for 40 A at 60 W of allowed dissipation with a reasonable heatsink. The typical switching times are downright blistering at 44 ns for turn-on and 48 ns for turn-off using the recommended minimum value of gate resistance (you can always increase the transition times by using a higher gate resistance, but reducing gate resistance below the minimum can result in destructive oscillations).

The 600 V IGBT with the lowest forward voltage drop of 1.36 V is IXYS part number IXGX72N60A3H1, which costs less than half as much as the MOSFET at about $12 in single quantities. It can even handle a slightly higher current of around 44 A for the same dissipation, but

APR 2014 19

THE TECH Recent improvements in both IGBT and MOSFET technology are blurring the lines between the two devices.

as promised, the price paid for lower conduction loss is a higher switching loss: rise time is still plenty fast at 34 ns, but fall time stretches out to a leisurely 250 ns, or about 5x slower than the MOSFET. And there is nothing the design engineer can do to make this IGBT turn off faster: the recombination time for the minority carriers is strictly a function of the way the IGBT is constructed (however, the turn-on time can be controlled by the gate resistance value, same as the MOSFET).

So you wouldn’t want to use the Fairchild MOSFET in a motor controller, because the faster a voltage is switched the more capacitively-coupled AC current will flow, and this AC current causes dielectric losses in the winding insulation (which wasn’t designed to be a capacitor!) and erosion of the bearings. In addition, a high switching frequency will result in higher “iron losses” in the motor (which increase at approximately the 1.6 power to frequency). Conversely, the IXYS IGBT wouldn’t be the best choice for use in a “hard-switched” DC-DC converter or charger, as the long turn-off time (and consequent high turn-off energy) would demand a lower switching frequency, which in turn means larger magnetic components (inductors and transformers) and capacitors.

There are other factors that have to be considered when choosing between IGBTs and MOSFETs, and one of the biggest gotchas with the latter is the so-called antiparallel “body” or “intrinsic” diode that is automatically formed alongside the MOSFET. The body diode seems like a win-win because you need an anti-parallel diode across each switch to conduct reactive current in an AC motor controller or a bridge converter, to give two examples. Unfortunately, the body diode in a MOSFET is slow to turn off, because it suffers the same recombination process that plagues the IGBT and it has a huge area - the same as the MOSFET itself - relative to what a discrete diode with the same voltage and current rating would otherwise require. Also note that the reverse recovery time (which is roughly equivalent to the fall time in an IGBT) increases with voltage rating. In fact, the reverse recovery time (trr) of the body diode in the Fairchild MOSFET is listed as 200 ns, that effectively means it is almost as slow as the IGBT, because when the reverse recovery time of a diode is longer than the turn-on rise time of the switch

20

it is paired with, the switch suffers increased losses from having to deal with what is effectively a short-circuit across the input supply, and the peak current during such time will only be limited by the stray inductance and resistance of the circuit.

In contrast, an anti-parallel diode must be specifically added to an IGBT, so it can be optimized both for area and recovery time (that said, note that the anti-parallel diode in the IXYS IGBT has a trr of 140 ns, which is quite a bit slower than the turn-on time of the IGBT at ~35 ns, but IXYS probably figures - rightly so - that you won’t want to turn on the IGBT in 35 ns when it will take 250 ns to turn it off).

Of course there are always the exceptions that prove the rule, and recent improvements in both IGBT and MOSFET technology are blurring the lines between the two devices. The aforementioned SiC MOSFET - though still a device that only uses majority carriers - can carry almost as much current per unit area as an IGBT with the same blocking voltage (though this arguably has more to do with SiC tolerating a much higher junction temperature and having better thermal conductivity, rather than higher conductivity). Another fairly recent innovation is the “Super Junction” MOSFET, which can exhibit 2-3x lower on resistance for a given blocking voltage, but it has a much more complicated structure, so it is still more expensive than an IGBT of similar current/voltage rating (the SJ MOSFET will still switch faster, though).

Improvements in IGBT technology have been more incremental over the past few years, but one new fabrication process, the “Non-Punch-Through” construction, has dramatically lowered the thickness of the silicon wafer required to make an IGBT without a reduction in blocking voltage. On-state voltage drop does increase, but it has a positive temperature coefficient at higher current, so multiple NPT devices in parallel will share current better. Turn-off time and short-circuit ruggedness are also much improved over the traditional IGBT fabrication process (now called “Punch-Through”) and that latter attribute has resulted in NPT IGBTs becoming the first choice for a semiconductor switch in motor controllers at the 100 kW+ power level, pretty much totally displacing older - and difficult to control - thyristor technology.

EVERY CONNECTION COUNTS

You go through an exacting process to produce remarkable results. You work at a problem until you can turn good into great. You begin and sometimes you begin again. As engineers ourselves, we have the same passion for excellence and quality that you do. We are dedicated to providing you with the critical components to help solve your biggest engineering challenges. At TE Connectivity, we are proud to make the connections you count on.

Connect with us at www.te.com/ev 2014 All Rights Reserved

Metal Fluoride Cathodes The Quest for the Next Gen:

Wildcat Discovery Technologies’ new copper fluoride cathode material offers 2.5x more capacity than today’s battery tech

By Christian Ruoff

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T

he current generation of lithium-ion battery materials is quickly approaching its theoretical limit. In commercial layered oxide cathodes, like the popular nickelmanganese-cobalt (NMC), there is only one lithium ion for every metal. So, the most energy you could possibly store with those materials is one full lithium in and out, or about 300 mAh per gram of cathode.

Today’s commercially available cells are cycling about 0.6 to 0.7 lithium ions per metal, and the market is steadily increasing that ratio by using more nickel- and manganese-rich compositions. Industry insiders report seeing several materials that are closer to 0.8 to 0.9 lithium ions per metal, and the lithium-rich NMC materials pioneered by Argonne National Laboratory - are basically cycling the full amount of lithium. In other words, the headroom for improvement is quickly dropping.

That reality has spurred a lot of research into next-generation cathode materials like lithium-air, lithium-sulfur and metal fluorides.

High Speed Science Wildcat Discovery Technologies uses proprietary methods to rapidly synthesize, test and evaluate energy storage materials. The venture-backed startup, based in San Diego, uses parallel development capabilities similar to the way discoveries are made in life sciences, such as pharmaceuticals. In the area of batteries, however, Wildcat is one of the only organizations that can synthesize useful storage materials in bulk form and then screen those materials very quickly to find out how useful they are.

The company uses its unique skills in collaborative research projects with many different chemical companies, cell manufacturers and even electronics and vehicle OEMs. It also funds its own internal projects when a new material seems particularly promising, like the copper fluoride CM4 cathode work.

“

It enables these metal fluoride materials to have similar rate capability and power to commercial layered oxide cathodes.

Last year, Charged reported that Wildcat Discovery Technologies is developing new techniques to overcome the shortcomings of a new copper fluoride formula that it calls CM4. Metal fluorides can have very high energy densities, but are known to have problems with low power density and poor cyclability. The Wildcat team thinks they see a path to improving these pitfalls in copper fluoride.

Now, with a major cell manufacturer as a development partner, the researchers are sharing more details.

To address the power problem, the company applied a newly developed molecular coating technique that is similar to carbon coating. Carbon coating can significantly increase the conductivity of electrodes, but cannot be used with many metal oxides and fluorides because the materials are reduced at the high temperatures required for coating. Wildcat found that when using its new coating process with copper fluoride electrodes originally developed while working on carbon fluoride primary batteries - the result is a high-capacity, highpower electrode.

“We’ve developed a non-graphitic conductive coating, different from the traditional carbon coatings like that used with lithium iron phosphate,” said Steven Kaye, Wildcat’s Chief Science Officer. “It enables these metal fluoride materials to have similar rate capability and power to commercial layered oxide cathodes. We’re getting great results. Instead of having to discharge cells in 50 hours, we can discharge them in 30 minutes or less.”

To improve cycle life, Wildcat uses another special

”

APR 2014 23

Figure 1: Metal Fluoride Cathodes & Silicon Anodes Same Thickness, 2.5x Capacity

Today’s Tech Same Capacity, Significantly Thinner 39

MFx

41

Si

100

NMC

100

MFx

100

Graphite

100

Si

Based on internal data from Wildcat Discovery Technologies

ner are excited by these advancements is that when you pair this metal fluoride cathode with one of the silicon anodes, currently showing real promise in the lab, you get a cell-level energy density about 2.5 times that of an NMC-graphite cell.

“Today’s cathodes in 18650 consumer electronics cells get approximately 650 to 700 Wh/L. With this copper fluoride material, you can get somewhere between 1,500 and 1,600 Wh/L with reasonable expectations for protective coating that offers “a very large improvement” a silicon anode,” explained Kaye. “That’s on par with the over the state-of-the-art copper fluoride technology, lithium-sulfur systems that people are very excited about, although there is still work to be done to get it to a more except you don’t have the problems with power or sulfur practical level. “We think we’ve got a technology with a dissolution.” path to the cycle life you’d need for commercial applicaSilicon offers a much higher capacity than graphite, tions,” said Kaye. The company has been tweaking the electrolyte and the composition, which is also helpful, but which means the anodes can be made thinner. But many silicon anodes also have cycle life problems, for two main the big technology leaps are the coatings.

The reason that Wildcat and its new development part- reasons: the expansion and contraction of the silicon; and the inability to form a stable solidelectrolyte interphase (SEI) at the surface of the silicon. The electrolyte Figure 2: needs to coat the surface of the anode Comparison of Lr-NMC, S, & MFx to protect it - a protective coating is very stable with graphite but not with Lr-NMC Li2S S xLiF+M // Si // Si // Li // Si silicon.

3.7 2.1 2.1 3.55 Cathode Voltage (V) However, Charged has reported 270 1170 1670 466 Capacity (mAh/g) on silicon anode prototypes with a 999 2460 3500 1650 Specific Energy (Wh/kg) cycle life that are very close to what 4.5 1.7 2.1 4.2 Density (kg/L) is needed for consumer electron310 456 443 Cell Specific Energy (Wh/kg)* 300 ics, from several cell makers. At this 990 810 1107 1490 Cell Energy (Wh/L)* point, it’s a basic trade-off between *18650 cell estimates. Anode: 1250 mAh/g Si or 1.5x excess Li. Porosity for all the amount of silicon in the anelectrodes assumed to be the same as commercial high-energy NMC. ode and how many cycles they can

When you pair this metal fluoride cathode with one of the silicon anodes...you get a cell-level energy density about 2.5 times that of an NMC-graphite cell.

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THE TECH achieve. There are cells with a few percent silicon that could probably be used today, but the capacity boost is not great. On the other hand, there are cells with 6-10 percent silicon and a considerable capacity boost that are very close to being commercial-ready.

Next step: more partners Wildcat has been in the battery materials R&D business for about four years, and CEO Mark Gresser says that research spending continues to increase. That’s not surprising when you look at the markets using Li-ion technology today, like electric vehicles and consumer electronics - both growing very fast.

The interesting part about battery research is the diversity of companies involved in it. “OEMs are doing research, cell makers are doing research, and materials and chemical companies are doing research,” said Gresser.

“They are spending money on R&D at all parts of the supply chain, which is unique to this industry.”

Wildcat is largely agnostic to any particular battery chemistry, application or stage of development - it will

“

work with anyone. So, With this copper even as some compafluoride material, nies go out of business you can get and others are acquired or shift focus, somewhere its business continues between 1,500 to grow. and 1,600 Wh/L Because of the with reasonable nature of Wildcat’s research methods, a de- expectations for a velopment project can silicon anode. move much faster with more funding. So, the company is actively seeking more partners for its copper fluoride project. “We’ve brought on a major cell manufacturer as a partner,” said Jon Jacobs, VP of Business Development. “Their expertise with-large format battery systems manufacturing will really speed the development of this material to market. Next, we’d like to add a major automotive OEM to the consortium to provide additional funding and expertise.”

”

The

Alloyed

Powers Along with its industry giant partner Alcoa, Israeli startup Phinergy says it has aluminum-air batteries for EVs in the can.

By Markkus Rovito

26

Photo by GPO (Israel Government Press Office)

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama meet with Phinergy CEO Aviv Tzidon

M

ore than 550 feet over the National Mall in Washington, DC, the single most significant piece of American aluminum triangulates a point between the White House, the US Capitol, and the Lincoln Memorial. It is the capstone of the Washington Monument, placed nearly 130 years ago, when an ounce of aluminum cost as much as an ounce of silver. The monument’s 100-ounce aluminum apex was the largest piece of cast aluminum in the world.

No one back then could have predicted how or why aluminum would be used to commemorate an American president again in our present times. Yet when President Barack Obama visited Israel in March of last year, aluminum (and zinc) played an important role in a handpicked presentation of Israeli technology put together for the American chief executive. The chief scientist of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs selected seven of Israel’s most innovative tech companies to display their advances in a special high-tech exhibit for Obama, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acting as the tour guide.

Reportedly one of the president’s favorite stops on the tour demonstrated prototype batteries for electric vehicles using water and air to oxidize light metals, such as aluminum and zinc. Obama told the CEO of the company, Phinergy, that they should talk to Ford or GM about its products, and that CEO, Aviv Tzidon, asked for an introduction.

APR 2014 27

THE TECH A recycled technology At the time of President Obama’s Israeli trip, Ford and GM probably didn’t have much of a clue about Phinergy.

The company had just started to poke its head out of “stealth mode,” and into the public view. However, any company with a toe or two dipped into the waters of vehicle electrification had some awareness of metal-air batteries as a failed technology of about 25 years prior.

Metal-air had everyone’s attention because of its enormous energy potential, but it was largely written off because no one had been able to create an air electrode with a lifespan much longer than 100 hours. The electrodes suffered carbonization problems from not being able to adequately isolate oxygen from the air.

However, companies like Phinergy represent the brave new world of 21st-century nanotechnology, in which old limitations smash up against a wall of new-fangled materials. Phinergy’s first patent was for what it calls a nano-porous silver-based catalyst, which lets oxygen into the electrode and the cell while effectively blocking CO2. Tzidon told Charged that Phinergy’s invention has enabled its metal-air cathode to demonstrate an ongoing 25,000 working hours. “We have a very durable, economic, high-performance, air-diffuse cathode,” Tzidon said.

The challenge in making Phinergy’s catalyst material was to maintain the highest possible surface density.

The researchers found that pushing the nano-particles together would begin to reduce surface area, because the particles had the tendency to center. So instead of monitoring particle size, they monitored the distance between the particles and created a sponge-shaped structure with a continuously monitored surface area and a spacing between particles of 1-2 nm. “The separator does not allow the particles to merge together,” Tzidon said. “The mechanical spacer allows us to compress and get good connectivity by not losing surface area.”

This initial IP gave Phinergy a few advantages to build on. For example, a silver-based catalyst - the price of silver runs at about two percent that of comparable platinum, and silver is easy to recycle.

More importantly, with its stable air electrode, any Phinergy metal-air battery would not have to use pure oxygen, as is the case with most lithium-air technologies.

“

That leads to huge reductions in battery size and weight.

In a conventional battery using oxygen as the cathode, 60-80 percent of the battery’s volume comes from the cathode, because of the heavy materials that bind oxygen inside it. Phinergy’s technology can breathe oxygen from ambient air, allowing a high-capacity battery with low weight, and a cathode component that takes up about the same space as the electrolyte and metal anode components.

“The air-diffuse cathode has Teflon on the outside, so it breathes air,” Tzidon said.

“From the inside, there is our nano-structure catalyst covering the aluminum on both sides. The reaction creates electricity while consuming aluminum.”

Besides just nanotechnology, Tzidon lists other benefits Phinergy now enjoys that the previous generation did not. Integration with computers, microchips, and microcontrollers all count as big factors. “Today on a chip you can do many things that 20 years ago you needed a whole rack of processors to do the same task,” Tzidon said.

“Even lithium chemistry was available 20 years ago, but today’s lithium-ion without a battery management system - a tiny chip per cell - would not survive.”

Tzidon also points out that there is greater emphasis on a multidisciplinary approach to R&D today than there was before. There is more fluidity in looking for solutions along the lines of pure chemistry, computer control, packaging, rapid prototyping, etc.

We have a very durable, economic, high-performance, air-diffuse cathode

28

”

Phinergy’s wake Based on its initial patent, Tzidon founded Phinergy in 2008, but the technology originated all the way back in 2000 at the Bar-Ilan University in Israel. The main focus has been on aluminum-air batteries, but in 2010 Phinergy also started working on zinc-air, which Tzidon says differs in energy density and the fact that zinc-air can be a secondary battery, while aluminum-air is a primary battery.

Phinergy now has an additional 18 patents pending.

“They are all associated with the kinds of hurdles that in the past were killers,” Tzidon said. “Today there are ways to walk through the difficulties.”

While Phinergy is developing products for a range of

Image courtesy of Phinergy

“

The reaction creates electricity while consuming aluminum.

applications, including consumer electronics, stationary energy storage, aerospace, and defense, the company is concentrating heavily on EVs. It’s a refreshing change of pace, because so often battery innovators need to break into electronics before scaling up to vehicles. Because the bottleneck with aluminum-air was not its energy density, cycle life, recharge rate, etc., it could be introduced to EVs early on once it was viable.

“From a business standpoint, we could look at our generator and start from the easiest to the most difficult, meaning starting with stationary storage, data center back-up, etc., where you don’t care about footprint,” Tzidon said. “But we decided to shape the technology to the most extreme environment: the car, which is mobile, crash-proof, small, etc. It’s more complicated to demonstrate the car than to demonstrate a generator. The reason we went to the extreme solution was mainly to break the negative stigma associated with the failure of 20-something years ago. People who remember it will be

”

skeptical. They don’t remember why it failed - they just remember ‘it will never work.’”

Of course, that stigma falls apart if one sees that it does work. By 2012, Phinergy had a demonstration EV working with its aluminum-air battery as a range extender to a Li-ion battery, the same way that a hydrogen fuel cell would function in an FCEV, or the way an ICE extends the range of the Chevrolet Volt.

That set the stage for Phinergy’s breakout year in 2013, when it finally began to go public with the results of 13 years of work. In early 2013, Phinergy signed a joint development agreement with aluminum giant Alcoa to get its aluminum anode up to an affordable commercial scale, and it also got its first major OEM contract from Renault-Nissan. “We wanted to be as mature as possible and as ready to commercialize as possible, before making public announcements,” Tzidon said.

Phinergy has now set a schedule to have a commercially-available car using its aluminum-air technology as

APR 2014 29

a range extender, and to do so, it will need a lot of help from its biggest partner.

Alcoa can’t wait The same year that the Washington Monument opened to the public, 1888, Charles Martin Hall founded Alcoa, then known as the Aluminum Company of America. As Douglas Ramsey, Business Development, Breakthrough Technologies at Alcoa told Charged, “we invented the aluminum industry. Our founder created an industrialscale process to drive the price down.” Since then, Alcoa has become the largest and possibly only completely vertical aluminum company that does the entire process of mining, refining, smelting, rolling, casting, and final end-product integration of aluminum. The company had revenue of $23 billion in 2013.

“Air-aluminum was an area of interest to us cyclically over the last few decades, and we’ve continued to track it,” Ramsey said. “Discovering what Phinergy was doing was a revelation. Our ability to take our expertise from the last few decades and apply that to the system under development at Phinergy has allowed us to get very quickly over the past 12 months to the point where we have a viable, very competitive solution for commercial automotive and other applications.”

Alcoa’s job in the partnership is essentially to perfect the fuel, aluminum. Tzidon likens the type of aluminum used in Phinergy’s system to the octane in gasoline there are different alloys that could work. These alloys are special to the process, but not as complicated as aerospace materials. They are made by rolling, similar to the way automotive sheet enclosures are made. Alcoa works on mass-producing the most efficient aluminum for the most competitive price, and that price would be essentially anything less than the price of gas per mile.

How it works Not only does Phinergy want the cost of its aluminum-air batteries to have a price equal to or less than gas, but the company also wants the user experience to be as easy as operating an ICE vehicle or a PHEV. “We are trying to do this technology without the need to educate the customers,” Tzidon said. “If you introduce a new technology, and it is too revolutionary, you might lose in the game. You should do a step at a time. We’re trying to initiate a petrol-like solution, where every 10 days or more you go to a gas station. So, you go less often.”

30

By 2012, Phinergy had a demonstration EV working with its aluminum-air battery as a range extender to a Li-ion battery, the same way that a hydrogen fuel cell would in an FCEV, or the way an ICE extends the range of the Chevrolet Volt.

Why would you need to go to a gas station? It’s for the occasional times that you need to swap out the water.

Phinergy’s aluminum-air battery releases energy from the aluminum when it reacts with water and air. For every 1 kg of aluminum, you need 1 liter of water and 1 kg of oxygen from ambient air, and the reaction creates a waste product of approximately 3 kg of aluminum hydroxide, which later can be reused or recycled back into aluminum. If you plug in the car to recharge the Li-ion battery, the electricity can also replenish some of the aluminumair battery’s electrolyte (water). However, after driving long distances on aluminum-air, the electrolyte will be soaked with dissolved aluminum, and you will need to swap it out. Tzidon thinks existing gas stations could do that easily. Onboard filtration will take out active elements such as chlorine before feeding it to the battery, so you could fill it with tap water from a sink, garden hose, or wherever.

“We are working on a scheme whereby the gas station will take the valuable aluminum hydroxide, and refill the water or regenerate your electrolyte,” Tzidon said. “We don’t know the process yet, but the waste has value. So instead of the gas station charging you for petrol, they will assist you, charging us for collecting the material.

This replacement is equivalent in time to fast charge or battery replacement. You download 20 gallons, and you upload 20 gallons. In the gas station, there is a machine pump we give them that filters your used electrolyte.

It splits aluminum hydroxide to the left and fresh electrolyte to the right. Then a new customer comes in and takes yesterday’s electrolyte that was refurbished at night.

That 20 gallons of water will be equivalent to another 300-400 miles from the aluminum-air battery. So you

THE TECH

“

Image courtesy of Phinergy

We are working on a scheme whereby the gas station will take the valuable aluminum hydroxide, and refill the water or regenerate your electrolyte.

have the lowest complexity we can imagine influencing the infrastructure. Hydrogen fuel cells are not so simple; fast charge is huge in terms of [power] that you need; and battery swap is not easy to do.”

As the other piece of maintenance, the aluminum will need to swapped out, which Tzidon believes can be done during the regularly scheduled annual check-up for a car.

The idea for the Phinergy range extender is that it would be used about as much as the Chevy Volt ICE range extender, or about 10-15 percent of the total miles driven.

”

Tzidon listed the theoretical specific energy of Phinergy’s aluminum-air as 8.1 kWh per kilogram of aluminum.

The company’s current iteration achieves 3.5 kWh per kilogram. Its production roadmap anticipates increases in that number, but even at its current level, a battery with 100 kg of aluminum would provide around 2,000 miles of driving, depending on the vehicle. Tzidon expects that to be enough for a typical driver going 20,000 miles a year.

Meanwhile, the large back-up range extender eliminates range anxiety for a pure EV without the need for

Module and pack level testing CAN, I2C SMBus capable Drive cycle simulation Import drive cycle from table of values Battery power is recycled to AC grid in discharge Utilizes Maccor’s standard battery test software suite No system power limit, up to 900 KW

“

Instead of an internal combustion engine range extender, you have a silent, zero CO2, cheaper-than-gasoline solution. It’s a win-win.

”

a huge, heavy, expensive 300-mile Li-ion battery that most drivers will only use to capacity a few days per year. Aluminum-air has no self-discharge. Phinergy also claims substantial potential reductions in the total volume, weight, and price of the overall battery system when you replace part of a large Li-ion battery pack with an aluminum-air range extender. For every kilogram of Li-ion battery that an OEM replaces with a kilogram of aluminum, that OEM gets 30 times the energy, according to Tzidon.

“We all know that one barrel of gasoline gives us around 1,000 miles,” Tzidon said. “One barrel of aluminum can give us about five times better. Instead of an internal combustion engine range extender, you have a silent, zero-CO2, cheaper-than-gasoline solution. It’s a win-win. You have a full electric car that uses the same computer to activate our range-extending device.”

Phinergy also plans on redirecting heat from its battery to heat the car when needed. “The efficiency of the aluminum reaction is about half electricity, half heat,” Tzidon said. “When we warm an electric car now, we lose range more dramatically, but whenever we activate the aluminum, we can warm the car. In Atlanta for example, that can save 230 kWh in a year, or in New York, 350 kWh.” Any OEM choosing to work with Phinergy’s aluminum-air technology will be able to choose its own battery-size options according to its own needs. “This technology is eminently modular,” said Ramsey. “We can build this up to be a bank of 50 if needed. The OEMs have their own aperture they can design to.”

OEM OMG During February’s Advanced Automotive Battery Conference 2014 in Atlanta, Tzidon presented Phinergy’s aluminum-air technology and issued calls to Tier 1 partners who could help accelerate the company’s path to

32

volume production, as well as OEMs who want to use its batteries, joining Renault-Nissan, which was the first big automotive manufacturer to sign up. He touted selling points such as sustainability, safety, and pure economics.

Phinergy won’t be satisfied until the cost of battery is less per mile than gasoline.

“Aluminum is eight percent of the earth’s crust; it’s the most abundant metal on earth,” Tzidon said. They can also create the aluminum in a smelter where electricity is cheap and abundant and then export it to where it’s needed.

“We are actually importing cheap, clean sustainable energy from Norway or Iceland, where you have so much energy but nothing to do with it,” Tzidon says. “You ship it in a tanker full of aluminum, and if the tanker sinks, nothing happens. It’s not like a catastrophe of oil in the ocean. It is safe; it can wait nearly forever. The way to look at aluminum might be as a solid-state reservoir of energy: 8 kWh in 1 kg of aluminum.”

The finished product is also protected from leakage.

“We built a tank of electrolyte and connected it to the bottom and top of these cascade cells. By flowing the electrolyte in, we activate a generator. If the electrolyte is out, it is in a dry state, and it can stay in that position for many years. There is no leakage, because it is a battery with a missing connectivity between cathode and anode.”

An OEM using Phinergy’s aluminum-air technology will have an additional opportunity to generate customer loyalty and extra revenue by selling the customer new aluminum when they bring the car in for annual service, as well as by repurposing or recycling the waste aluminum hydroxide. “We learned with Alcoa that aluminum hydroxide can be used to create a very nice fire- and smoke-retardant material,” Tzidon said, adding that such a use could increase the value of aluminum hydroxide by as much as five times.

“The OEM likes this, because it can sell energy as spare parts in a value chain it usually is not part of. With fuel

“

They can also create the aluminum in a smelter where electricity is cheap and abundant and then export it to where it’s needed.

”

THE TECH cells, they don’t get a piece of the action from the hydrogen, and they don’t get a piece of the action from the grid fueling the batteries.”

So an OEM could potentially profit directly from aluminum and aluminum hydroxide sales, but also indirectly from building up sustainability credentials. Tzidon wants Phinergy to maintain a holistic approach to reducing the carbon impact of its products, and he thinks that Alcoa is the best possible partner to discover the most sustainable manufacturing process. “It’s important for us to look at the issue of electrifying cars in such a way that the total CO2 footprint will be better than other solutions. When we look at other chemistries that have a nice capacity, we ask, ‘What is the total footprint to create one kilowatt, one mile, one lifecycle, etc.?’ This is important if we really want to improve the world.”

“We have an end-to-end, totally recyclable, zero-CO2, zero-emission, system,” said Ramsey, “along with the great visual of sticking the garden hose in your car to power up.”

All of the aforementioned factors can help to break the

“

The way to look at aluminum might be as a solid-state reservoir of energy: 8 kWh in 1 kg of aluminum.

”

negative stigma that aluminum-air developed in its early formative years. In some ways, the past failure of metalair batteries may eventually help Phinergy’s reputation when it validates, proves, and publicizes its technologies further. Even if aluminum-air remains notorious in some circles, it at least has name recognition that other emerging solutions may not. “There’s an understanding of aluminum-air’s potential within the automotive and power electronics communities,” Tzidon said. “People have been waiting for this moment when somebody says, ‘I’ve fixed the fundamentals on getting it to market, getting the fuel right, the design right, and the controls right.’” Consider it said.

Accelerate battery discoveries with Wildcat

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Wildcat uses proprietary high throughput technology to accelerate battery R&D. This massively parallel technique enables our scientists to investigate hundreds of materials in the time standard laboratories look at a handful. Wildcat’s customers reduce R&D costs and get products to market faster; new cathodes, anodes, electrolytes, synthetic methods and formulations are all possible. Wildcat is ready to help get your new cell technology to market…F-A-S-T!

CURRENTevents

Wireless charging pioneer WiTricity has announced an intellectual property license agreement with TDK Corporation, which will enable the Japanese firm to commercialize WiTricity’s patented technology to create wireless charging systems for carmakers.

TDK may be most familiar to (older) US readers for its high-quality cassette tapes, but in fact its forte is the manufacture of an iron-based material called ferrite, whose magnetic properties make it essential not only for audio and video tapes, but also for wireless charging systems. The company has a rapidly growing business as a Tier 1 and Tier 2 supplier to the automotive industry.

Under the new agreement, TDK will be able to offer wireless charging systems to OEMs for future plug-in vehicles. TDK is also licensed to offer compatible automotive wireless charging sources for home, commercial, and public use.

In late February, Toyota announced verification testing of a newly developed wireless charging system in cooperation with WiTricity. Toyota Managing Officer Satoshi Ogiso announced in August that the next-generation Prius Plug-in Hybrid would include a wireless charging option.

“There is widespread recognition that wireless charging will be central to the growth of the electric vehicle market,” said WiTricity CEO Alex Gruzen.

“We are proud to help advance the market for wireless charging with such an accomplished partner as TDK.”

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Photo courtesy of Nissan

WiTricity licenses wireless charging patents to TDK

Nissan offers multistandard DCFC in Germany

Nissan has partnered with the Berlin-based electrical infrastructure provider Omexom to deploy a network of 100 DC rapid chargers across Germany.

Omexom will be the project manager for the network roll-out. Charger locations will include dealers, fleet customers and real estate developments.

Similar announcements are common enough these days, as the Japanese automaker aggressively expands its empire of CHAdeMO-compatible fast chargers in Europe. What’s interesting about the latest news is that these stations will be capable of adding dual-standard compatibility. According to Nissan, a CCS cable, as well as Level 2 AC charging, can be added if desired.

“We are convinced that DC fast charging stations should be available for all electric vehicles,” said Joachim Kopf, Nissan’s EV Manager for Germany, Austria and Switzerland. “Therefore, our QuickCharger can also be ordered with CCS and 43 kW AC connections. And, despite this, our fast-charging standard CHAdeMO is currently the best-selling in the country.”

THE INFRASTRUCTURE

The UK is rapidly rolling out fast charging stations - over 500 to date - thanks in part to funding from the Department for Transport’s Office for Low Emission Vehicles (OLEV). The latest project to be announced is in Northumberland, where the County Council is installing 20 ABB multi-standard, triple-outlet public chargers.

The ABB Terra 53CJG chargers are connected to the Pay As You Go national network provided by Charge Your Car. They feature both 50 kW CCS and CHAdeMO DC charging and a 43 kW Fast AC option (compatible with cars from Renault, Daimler and Tesla). The stations have various connectivity features, including remote assistance, management and servicing and smart software upgrades. ABB is responsible for project management,

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“Northumberland County Council chose ABB for its proven expertise in deploying and managing nationwide EV charging networks,” says company spokesman Graham Barlow. “ABB provides the chargers and industry-leading software solutions for remote servicing as well as connectivity to subscriber management and payment systems.”

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Northumberland deploys 20 multi-standard chargers

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THE INFRASTRUCTURE

Hybricon Bus Systems of Umeå, Sweden, near the Arctic Circle, has been testing its new Ultrafast Charging system with the Opbrid Bůsbaar - featuring a pantograph and an overhead charging rail. The buses charged at 625 amps (400 V DC) for 6 minutes in recent tests, and infrared photos showed a temperature increase of only 9.8 degrees at the critical junction between the pantograph and the overhead charging rail.

The company’s goal is to charge at 500-1000 kW, to enable 2-3 minute charges at the end stations of longer bus routes.

“We have been using 400 V DC up until now, but we will now switch to 700 (672) V DC nominal,” Boh Westerlund, Hybricon founder and CTO told Charged. “We have today built a 300 kW charging station for the basic tests, but will this year build two 650 kW stations and plan for 950 kW stations next year.”

The 12-meter Hybricon Arctic Whisper (HAW) uses

batteries specifically designed for high charging rates and cold temperatures. The HAW buses use a modular design, and can be delivered with different battery types and pack sizes for different charging solutions. They can also be equipped with a diesel range extender.

“On the currently running Ultrafast Charged HAW 12 LE, we only need a 50 kWh battery pack for the 14 km airport route,” explained Westerlund. “On our former retrofitted buses we had 100 kWh packs. In the 400 V charging system we used 25 kWh pack size as a base, but this will now increase to 40 kWh packs for each string as a base with the 672 V system.”

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THE INFRASTRUCTURE

Photos courtesy of Honda

Honda’s Smart Home stores solar energy for Fit EV Honda’s new Smart Home US, located on the West Village campus of the University of California, Davis, is a showcase for technologies that enable zero net-energy living and transportation, including Honda’s home energy management system (HEMS), a hardware and software system that monitors and optimizes electrical generation and consumption.

The Smart Home is capable of producing more energy than it consumes, including enough juice to power a Honda Fit EV. The home’s solar panels are expected to generate a surplus of 2.6 MWh of electricity per year, while a comparable home will consume approximately 13.3 MWh. A 10 kWh battery energy storage system in the garage, using the same lithium-ion cells that are used in the Honda Fit EV, allows stored solar energy to be used at night. Honda’s HEMS leverages the battery to balance, shift and buffer loads to minimize the home’s impact on the electric grid.

The Honda Fit EV included with the home has been modified to accept DC power directly from the home’s solar panels or stationary battery, eliminating up to half of the energy that is typically lost to heat during DC-toAC and AC-to-DC power conversion. When the solar panels are generating electricity at full capacity, the vehicle can fully recharge in approximately two hours directly from sunlight.

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Fuel Nissan and NRG eVgo have pioneered a multinetwork consortium to make topping up the bestselling EV a considerable re-LEAF.

Photo courtesy of WSDOT/Flickr

By Markkus Rovito

W

hen Nissan last graced the Charged cover (March/April 2013 issue), the company was picking itself up and dusting itself off. Its LEAF had taken a shellacking in the press after the all-electric car sold less than 50 percent of the company’s goal of 20,000 for 2012. But Nissan’s response was all business. It chose to not release LEAF sales goals for 2013 and instead focused on making its new 2013 model LEAF an undeniable deal. The three new LEAF models for 2013 came in with a slightly increased range and significantly decreased prices.

However, the strategists at Nissan knew that improving the LEAF itself was only going to be part of the sale. To break through to more people than just the early-adopting true believers, Nissan wanted to alleviate potential customers’ concerns that fuel for the LEAF (electricity) was hard to find. In 2013, Nissan doubled its efforts to spread its CHAdeMO DC fast charging stations across North America and Europe. By April 2014, Nissan had exceeded its expectations by installing - according to the company’s own internal data - at least 610 of its DC fast chargers in the United States, with more on the way.

“We’re well ahead of our goal, and we’re going to keep adding chargers every day though our network of partnerships,” Brendan Jones, Nissan’s Director of EV Infrastructure and Strategy, told Charged. “We have a philosophy about charging at home, at work, and in the community,” he continued. “If our customers have the trifecta, great. But we always want them to have two of the three. We believe you have to build infrastructure in and around where our customers work, live, and travel in their daily lives. When you have heavy consumers of community infrastructure, and you put a fast charger there, people flock to it. The data strongly supports that.”

The LEAF ended 2013 with a total of 22,610 sold in the US, and strong momentum from its biggest sales month in December. However, even with Nissan playing a huge role in spreading the CHAdeMO fast-charging standard, it could never single-handedly solve the charging infrastructure problem. And many believe that without sufficient infrastructure, it’s unlikely that Nissan will reach the 150,000-LEAF annual capacity that it says its Tennessee assembly plant can scale to.

Last October, in an effort to move more EVs, Nissan launched the “No Charge to Charge” program in the greater Dallas-Ft Worth and Houston areas. The offer gave new LEAF buyers and lessees free access for one year to all of NRG eVgo’s local Level 2 and DC fast charging Freedom Stations, which amounted to 23 locations in the Dallas-Ft Worth megalopolis, 17 in greater Houston, and local airport Park ‘N’ Fly locations. The six-month program stretched from October 1 to March

“

We have a philosophy about charging at home, at work, and in the community...we always want them to have two of the three.

”

Brendan Jones, Nissan’s Director of EV Infrastructure and Strategy

APR 2014 41

Photo courtesy of Nissan

31, 2014. According to Nissan, through February 2014, LEAF sales grew in the test markets much faster than the overall regional and national rate: up nearly 60 percent in Dallas-Ft Worth, and up about 150 percent in Houston.

Such results were enough to convince Nissan to begin to rollout the program - with some important changes nationwide.

No money, no problem Beginning on July 1, 2014, Nissan’s No Charge to Charge program expands to 10 of the top Nissan LEAF markets in the US: San Francisco, Sacramento, San Diego, Seattle, Portland, Nashville, Phoenix, Dallas-Ft Worth, Houston, and Washington DC. Eligibility is retroactive to LEAF buyers and lessees beginning on April 1, 2014, and the free charging will continue for two years from the day the customer registers for the deal.

Some notable changes to the program are based on Nissan’s analysis of customer charging habits and the company’s work to unify the major charging networks with the new EZ-Charge card. Jones said, “The Texas

42

“

Most customers who arrive at a DC fast charger come in at 35-45 percent state of charge.

Their average time on the charger is about 17 minutes.

”

pilot was designed to see whether our dealers were structurally adjusted to offer this to consumers, the dealer infrastructure was in place, the public infrastructure was in place, the accounts receivables and payables mechanism worked, and did it resonate? Thankfully, all those proved to be very positive. We could manage it.”

So far, the EZ-Charge card will work with public Level 2 and DC fast chargers from ChargePoint, Car Charging Group’s Blink Network, AeroVironment (AV), and NRG eVgo. “In Texas, NRG controlled the whole market,”

Photo courtesy of NRG eVgo

THE INFRASTRUCTURE

“

The average dwell time on an L2 charger in most places like grocery stores is right under an hour.

”

Jones said. “It didn’t have the EZ-Charge card associated with it for interoperability.”

Also, while the pilot program was for one year of unlimited charging, the current No Charge to Charge offers two years of time-limited charging sessions. On a DC fast charger, customers will get up to 30 minutes of charging enough to fill up a LEAF on average from 0 to 80 percent state of charge. With Level 2, customers will receive a free hour of charging, which will net them an additional range of 12-25 miles, according to Nissan’s own reports.

Nissan used customer habit data from the No Charge

Texas pilot, as well as other LEAF-user info gathered for more than two years to determine the free charging time limits that would appease both customers and the charger owner/operators. “Most customers who arrive at a DC fast charger come in at 35-45 percent state of charge,” Jones said. “Their average time on the charger is about 17 minutes. So a 30-minute cap on DC fast chargers is more than enough for your average consumer. What it is dissuading to some degree is the extreme situation where somebody sits on the charger longer than 30 minutes, because they go beyond 80 percent and are trying to eke out that last 5 percent, which is where it might take a little bit longer. We don’t want that charger hogged up, and lines queuing.”

In the case of Level 2, No Charge to Charge covers public Level 2 stations - not workplace or private garage pay stations. “The average dwell time on an L2 charger in most places like grocery stores is right under an hour,” Jones said. “We timed it to the average use cases of most people across the country.”

For those LEAF users for whom the free Level 2 time

APR 2014 43

Photo courtesy of NRG eVgo

Photo Š CHARGED Electric Vehicles

Photo courtesy of Blink Network

Photo courtesy of WSDOT/Flickr

THE INFRASTRUCTURE

“

We’re simultaneously laying the groundwork for these plans to get to those other markets, and we’ll announce plans on a future date for making this scaleable country-wide.

”

is not free enough, the EZ-Charge card still will provide convenience, because it will have payment information stored and allow the user to pay for extra time at the standard rate for each individual charger.

Expanding interoperability

By July 2015, Nissan plans to extend No Charge to Charge to an additional 15 markets, for a total of 25 markets within a year of the program’s launch, which Jones said will represent 82 percent of the more than 50,000 LEAFs sold to date in the US. Nissan hasn’t revealed what the next 15 markets will be, but Jones did say that they may not necessarily be strictly the next 15 areas with the highest sales.

“Sales are a big criterion, but it is the level of chargers in the market,” Jones said. “You take care of customers.

You want to make sure that when the LEAF sells, there are enough chargers to maintain customer satisfaction.

We have a few holes in some of the markets, so we’re going to wait until we fill some of those holes with DC fast chargers. We have aggressive plans, and we’ll pull forward some of the launch dates.”

As it stands now, Jones said Nissan will announce some additional markets for the program late this summer, and more by the end of the year, with the program launching in certain new markets by January 2015.

In the meantime, Nissan and NRG eVgo, which manages the EZ-Charge card, will be working hard to not only secure the participation of charging station owner/ operators, but also to sign up more charging networks on top of the four major networks on board as of now.

“A lot of those networks are reaching out to Nissan and eVgo,” Jones said. “There are 10 networks in the US. Who would believe you could have 10 different cards? That’s just ridiculous. Now Nissan customers will have one

card, and that’s what we want. It’s a very neutral platform, but Nissan doesn’t want to be the one in the middle of the charging business. So we selected eVgo to manage that platform, while they also manage their individual network simultaneously. And everybody plays as an equal partner: Car Charging Group, AeroVironment, ChargePoint, etc.”

Not only does Nissan want to sign up every charging network for the EZ-Card program, but it also wants to expand the program nationwide after the initial 25 markets go online. “We’re not going to leave the other markets just hanging there,” Jones said. “We’re simultaneously laying the groundwork for these plans to get to those other markets, and we’ll announce plans on a future date for making this scalable country-wide.”

EZ for all Regardless of anyone’s personal preference for electric automaker and/or charging provider, the success of the EZ-Charge card could spell success for the whole EV industry, because the EZ-Charge card will not be exclusive to Nissan. Any OEM could adopt it. Jones says the No Charge to Charge program’s potential for success hinges upon its interoperability between charging networks and EV OEMs. “I think the charging partners coming together and realizing their customer satisfaction is huge,” Jones said.

“It’s as important to them as it is to the OEM. My hat’s off to ChargePoint, AV, the Blink Network, and eVgo for coming together and forming those agreements. That’s just a win for customers - not only for Nissan customers, but the industry as a whole. The cards can be used for another OEM, as well, if they choose to use its interoperability. That’s great for the EV movement.”

In a way, the No Charge to Charge and EZ-Charge card initiatives also pursue the goal of a non-profit group try-

“

My hat’s off to ChargePoint, AV, the Blink Network, and eVgo for coming together and forming those agreements.

That’s just a win for customers.

”

APR 2014 45

“

Next-level success is simplicity for our consumers, that they understand infrastructure, and that our dealers have a much easier way to explain it.

”

Spending money to make money Of course, no one should think that Nissan has embarked on some kind of altruistic crusade. Jones makes it clear that the point of No Charge to Charge is to drive sales.

It worked during the pilot program in Texas, and the nationwide rollout of the program certainly means to keep the LEAF in its current position as the best-selling pure EV. “We’re a sales company, absolutely,” Jones said. “We’re not going to say how big of a sales bump we expect out of this, but it needs to drive sales. We’re confident that

Photos courtesy of Nissan

ing to eradicate a disease. Their ultimate success would be to eliminate concern over charging availability and convenience from the EV buyer’s mind. Then, Jones said, the OEMs can concentrate more and more on the vehicles, rather than their fuel.

“Next-level success is simplicity for our consumers, that they understand infrastructure, and that our dealers have a much easier way to explain it,” Jones said. “One card gets you access to the DC fast chargers and the L2s in your area. All the miscommunication that has happened in the past goes away, and we can focus on what it’s really about - that when buying an EV, your fueling needs are taken care of. We need to get to a place where

the fueling takes a back seat to the product. That’s true for Nissan and every other OEM. The product needs to lead the way. We’ll build the infrastructure behind the scenes and find a way to easily communicate it, and we’re heading towards that goal right now.”

THE INFRASTRUCTURE it’s going to drive sales. I have a LEAF at home, and two neighbors have also bought one, because our car is present throughout the neighborhood, and they always see it. Think about if a customer goes home and says ‘This is the easiest thing to fuel. I’ve got this card; I’ve got a home charger; I’m done. I thought there was some complexity to this, but there’s not.’ That word of mouth will increase sales.”

The program also helped make sales easier for dealers during the pilot run in Texas. Dealers were able to explain the convenience of the program, show the customers where available chargers were during a test drive, and often demonstrate DC fast charging on the lot. “It really resonated that the customer saw that there was an infrastructure,” Jones said.

Although it’s not giving specific figures, there is certainly some cost to Nissan to implement No Charge to Charge. However, Jones said that Nissan is not actually paying the charging fees that would otherwise be incurred. In most public charging situations (like those on the ChargePoint network), the individual site hosts

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own the hardware and are responsible for setting the fees.

In those cases, ChargePoint and NRG are signing up each site host for the program. The majority of Level 2 sites according to Jones - are already free to use. “There’s very few instances where an actual profit from the charge station is what makes the site host happy,” Jones said. “There are some, but they’re isolated. Most of them are providing a service to a retail customer. So it benefits the site hosts to be in the program. All indications are that by the time the program launches, we’ll hit the high penetration rate we’re looking for on the amount of L2s available.”

If you live in one of No Charge to Charge’s initial rollout markets, expect to see or hear some advertising that heavily pushes the “free charging” and “network agnostic” angles. Nissan will geo-target its marketing efforts according to the facilities and demands of a particular region. Although common themes should involve the number of chargers available, the convenience of interoperability, and of course, that it’s free!

“We’re excited about it,” Jones said. “We think it’s a step in the right direction.”

BC Hydro PUSHES FOR A TIMELY Fast Charger Rollout The British Columbian energy giant partners with local governments to speed things up

By Christian Ruoff

nadian province of British Columbia. It’s government-owned and vertically integrated, meaning that the company owns and operates everything from production and transmission to distribution to customers. The company’s 30 hydroelectric facilities meet 78 percent of its electricity requirements, with the balance coming from three natural gas-fueled thermal power plants and other sources.

As part of a $14.3-million provincial Clean Energy Vehicle Program, BC Hydro has begun to connect Canada’s west coast for EV drivers. The goal is to install 30 DC fast charging stations in the Pacific Northwest by March 2016 - seven are currently up and running.

Photo courtesy of ABB

BC Hydro is the electricity supplier for about 95 percent of the Ca-

Photo courtesy of Eaton

“Governments take responsibility to support any kind of opportunity for economic development and greenhouse gas reductions,” said Alec Tsang, Senior Technology Strategist at BC Hydro.

Tsang’s group, from the office of the Chief Technology Officer, is overseeing the installation of the stations. The program is not a new business opportunity for BC Hydro, but rather a project to help facilitate the “critical EV infrastructure” necessary for the market to grow.

50

Creative business models As a government-backed regulated utility, BC Hydro is not as nimble as some investor-owned utilities, which could quickly decide to get into EV charging as a new business opportunity. So, the team had to be a little creative to get the ball rolling as fast as possible.

“We struggled to find the right business model,” Tsang told Charged. “This is not a demonstration project, where we would deploy the chargers for a fixed amount of time

THE INFRASTRUCTURE The problem with this scenario is that EV charging is considered a new class of service. It’s a point-of-sale transaction, and there is no active tariff that would be applicable. All the current tariffs are based on a useraccount model, with a specific customer name and classifications attached. But EV charging is like an energy vending machine, and BC Hydro would have to file for a new tariff. In a heavily-regulated industry, that could take years.

“

This is not a demonstration project... It’s something that will have a legacy, and we had to seek out a viable business model.

”

and then pull them out. It’s something that will have a legacy, and we had to seek out a viable business model.”

The team considered three possible scenarios: 1. Utility owned and operated The chargers could be an extension of BC Hydro’s infrastructure. The company could deploy, own and operate, just like any other asset in the public space with a rightof-way or public land lease.

2. Public-private partnership The private sector could own and operate the charging stations. Could there be some kind of public-private arrangement that fills the installation, maintenance and billing needs associated with long-term operation of the chargers?

Again, this scenario presented some regulatory issues that could not be resolved quickly. The provincial utility regulations do stipulate that a private entity can act like a utility and provide electricity as a billable service. However, it must first register as a utility, which is no small feat. It’s doable, but it’s not something that companies will take lightly and quickly jump into, because there is a lot of legal work involved.

Tesla Motors has announced plans to install, own and operate a handful of its Superchargers in British Columbia by the end of 2014. However, Tesla provides free use of the Superchargers for its customers, forever. Tsang says that this has allowed it to move much more quickly, because the company doesn’t have to register as a utility that sells electricity to customers. But unlike this rare example - in which a vehicle OEM builds free fast charging into its overall business - most other public charging suppliers need to find a sustainable business model by billing their users in some way.

APR 2014 51

Photo courtesy of ABB

3. Locally owned In the end, BC Hydro found one workable solution consistent with the Utility Commissions Act. In British Columbia, local governments, or municipalities, can provide electrical services to constituents within their jurisdiction. They are allowed to resell electricity with a few minor constraints that protect customers from being gouged with huge mark-ups. Basically, they buy the electricity from BC Hydro, provide a service and then recoup their costs with a small margin for profit.

So, BC Hydro set out to make partnerships with municipal governments to host the 30 chargers. It installs the hardware and has a lease-to-own agreement with the host government that operates it.

52

Site selection There are currently seven DC fast charging stations installed and operational in the following communities: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

Nanaimo Duncan Surrey Kamloops Merritt Squamish Langley

Compared to the very high-voltage systems that BC Hydro is familiar with, these charging stations are

THE INFRASTRUCTURE relatively simple to install. However, Tsang reports that, “it’s been a challenge to balance site selection for high visibility, near highway corridors and access to power.” If a site has to be upgraded to meet power needs, the cost of installation can be much higher. “We’re trying to manage a balance between the cost of installation and the ideal site.”

“

These community stations will create a sense that the infrastructure is there. A ‘build it, and they will come’ kind of approach that follows along with the data seen in Japan.

”

To find the best sites, Tsang’s team started at the map level. The stations need to bridge the range limitations of currently available EVs, which means “about every 50-75 km or so, that was the first rule of thumb,” explained Tsang.

The next step was to look at potential early adopters: Which communities contain the most EV owners, and which are likely to be fast followers? “We don’t want to deploy the chargers in remote areas where everyone drives pickup trucks,” said Tsang. “Then they’re going to sit and collect dust.”

By targeting the right communities, BC Hydro hopes to create a kind of placebo effect. “The stations may not get a lot of use, because people who drive EVs will charge at home for the most part and only use public chargers in a pinch,” explained Tsang. “But these community stations will create a sense that the infrastructure is there. A ‘build it, and they will come’ kind of approach that follows along with the data seen in Japan. When they installed fast charging networks, they found that drivers would go longer distances and come back with a lower state of charge. Not necessarily using the stations, but taking advantage of that safety net.”

One of the main objectives of the project is public outreach, so the company is looking for locations within communities that combine high-profile foot traffic with near-highway access. “If you’re on a major highway that is

not a pedestrian-friendly area, you’re not going to get the public outreach,” said Tsang. “Vehicle traffic drives by too quickly. They might see the sign, and it may or may not register. So, ideally, we’re looking to put these in community hubs where you get a lot of foot traffic, with informational signs that tell the EV story.”

So far, site selection appears to be a success. “The feedback we’ve received from drivers has been really positive about locations and site hosts,” Andy Bartosh, EVCI Program Manager at ABB, told Charged. ABB and Eaton are the two manufacturers of DC fast charging hardware chosen to supply equipment for the project. The backend management will use Greenlot’s SKY Network, which utilizes the Open Charge Point Protocol (OCPP) across both Eaton and ABB chargers.

“Eaton’s goal is to provide BC Hydro with charging station solutions that enable easy access to control and monitor charging activities using an open charging protocol,” said Michael Dadian, product line manager, Electrical Sector, Eaton.

Proponents of OCPP say that its “openness” allows customers and site hosts the ability to switch network providers - offering more competition and flexibility compared to other proprietary networking solutions.

When all 30 stations are installed, the network will be one of the largest on the continent. “Next to eVgo’s Freedom Stations [and Tesla’s Superchargers], this is the most comprehensive Fast Charging network in North America,” said Bartosh.

CHAdeMO or SAE Combo Plug?

At this point, the plan is to install CHAdeMO hardware at all locations - a decision that was largely a function of timing. “We had a target of 30 stations,” explained Tsang, “and the concession was that we would install CHAdeMO to the point where SAE standards become available. It’s not a perfect project that way, but after this project is finished we’ll look at what happens to the industry standards.”

The “CHAdeMO or SAE Combo Plug” question is not an easy one to answer for someone in Tsang’s shoes.

All of the European and North American automakers (except Tesla) are behind the SAE standard, but there are currently zero vehicles on the road in Canada that use it. Meanwhile, Nissan and Mitsubishi have been selling CHAdeMO-enabled EVs in Canada for about two years.

And the Tesla Model S - Canada’s best-selling EV in 2013

APR 2014 53

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THE INFRASTRUCTURE Photo courtesy of ABB

“

The availability of chargers capable of handling both CHAdeMO and SAE Combo standards in a single unit is a welcome solution for drivers and site owners.

”

“Considering that auto manufacturers are currently supplying vehicles under both standards, and their understandable reliance on multi-year platforms to lower costs and increase quality, it makes sense to target coexistence between the two standards,” said Dadian.

“The standards issue does complicate the fast charging discussion,” added Bartosh. “But the availability of chargers capable of handling both CHAdeMO and SAE Combo standards in a single unit is a welcome solution for drivers and site owners.”

- is expected to have a CHAdeMO adaptor someday (its web store has said the adaptor is “coming soon” since October 2013).

So, it’s hard to say what will happen with the SAE Combo Plug and the legacy fleet of Japanese EVs and CHAdeMO fast chargers. Tsang explained that they started off conceptually understanding that there is a standards risk here, “but the standards shakeout is too far down the road for us to consider for this project.”

The BMW i3, scheduled to go on sale this year, will be the first EV available in Canada to use the SAE standard, and charging industry watchers will have a close eye on its sales figures. “We have stations in the ground now that are only CHAdeMO,” said Tsang. “Moving forward, if the SAE standard becomes popular, we will look at deploying it as well - most likely it will be dual-port stations with both standards.”

Many in the industry are pushing for a peaceful resolution to the charging plug war, including the charging station manufacturers.

Free or fee?

The seven charging stations are currently free to use, but Tsang says they are “very close” to implementing a payment system. “We’re looking at different options, but haven’t announced anything officially. We have been consulting with a lot of end users to see what would be best in their minds.”

One might assume that EV drivers would be pushing for free public fast charging, but, as Tsang explains, that’s not the case. “A lot of the opinion leaders are pointing towards a time-based fee for a couple of reasons. One, they feel that it will keep people from stranding the assets - leaving their cars plugged in for longer than they need to charge. This is a big problem when you’re in need of a fast charge, because each station only charges one car at a time, and it takes up to 20 minutes to get to 80 percent charge from fully depleted. Drivers understand the mechanics around fast charging. A time-based fee would mean that as long as you’re connected, you’re paying.

That will push people onward, making sure that you’ll get high utilization of the infrastructure. ‘Take what you need to get where you want to go,’ is the attitude we want to promote.”

APR 2014 55

CURRENTevents

VW’s Chinese plans include plenty of plug-ins

Photo courtesy of Saroléa

Image courtesy of VW

Historic Belgian brand reborn as electric superbike

A team of Belgian entrepreneurs has resurrected a storied motorcycle brand to create an electric racing bike that will compete in the 2014 TT Zero race on the Isle of Man at the end of May, and also in the FIM eRoadRacing world cup series.

Saroléa was one of the first producers of motorcycles in the world when it started building bikes at its Belgian factory in the 1800s. It built a wide range of two-wheelers, including some famous racing champions, before going out of business in 1963.

The reinvented company, Saroléa Racing, has little in the way of obvious links to the past. Its SP7 electric racing bike is as futuristic as you please. The monotube frame, skin, fairing and swingarm are made from carbon fiber – unpainted, which gives it a threatening, bad-boy look.

The battery pack and 130 kW (180 hp) axial flux motor are liquid-cooled. Torque is 400 Nm (295 lb-ft), and weight is 200 kg. The machine is said to do 100 km/hr in 2.8 seconds, with a top speed of 250 kph (155 mph).

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The Volkswagen Group is the latest automaker to trumpet a major push into the Chinese market, and electrification is very much a part of its strategy.

The Porsche Panamera S E-hybrid is already in showrooms in China, the e-up! and e-Golf will be launched this year, and the Audi A3 e-tron and Golf GTE plug-ins are scheduled to arrive in 2015. And that’s not all. VW is developing two new plug-in hybrids specifically for the Chinese market - the Audi A6 and a new mid-size VW limousine are being developed together with the joint venture partners FAW Volkswagen and Shanghai Volkswagen, and will be produced locally.

“The Volkswagen Group is once again assuming a pioneering role in China and launching the biggest initiative for e-mobility in China’s automotive history,” said CEO Dr Martin Winterkorn. “Thanks to the modular strategy, which is also being implemented at our Chinese factories, we can electrify nearly every model in our range.”

The plug-in models are part of a major expansion in the Middle Kingdom. VW’s two joint venture partners plan to invest €18.2 billion by 2018, and the Group’s dealer network is to expand by 50 percent, from 2,400 dealerships to over 3,600.

“China is the Volkswagen Group’s largest single market and plays a key role in our Strategy 2018,” said Winterkorn. “For 2014, we have once again set our sights on double-digit growth in China and are aiming to deliver over 3.5 million vehicles to customers for the first time in a calendar year.”

THE VEHICLES

Officials from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have weighed in on the war between Tesla and the state auto dealers’ groups. They join several prominent politicians, a group of 70 economists and law professors, and over 133,000 citizens who signed a pro-Tesla petition in saying that state laws prohibiting the company’s direct sales model amount to protectionism for car dealers, at the expense of consumers.

Writing in the Competition Matters blog, FTC officials Andy Gavil, Debbie Feinstein, and Marty Gaynor said, in respect to the various state governments’ moves to restrict Tesla’s direct sales, “We believe this is bad policy for a number of reasons.”

The three point out that their views “do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Commission,” and of course this doesn’t change any existing laws. The relevant regulations are set by state legislatures, so it’s not clear that the federal government could do anything to resolve the dispute even if it wanted to.

The blog post reads, in part:

“

Consumers once shopped predominantly at their local stores; but first mail order catalogs and today the Internet have created new ways to shop for and purchase a wide range of goods and services. Similarly, consumers once arranged for taxis by hailing one from a street corner or by calling a dispatcher; yet today, smartphones and new software applications are shaking up the transportation industry, creating new business opportunities and new services for consumers.

In buying cars, however, these new ways to shop may not be available to consumers. For decades, local laws in many states have required consumers to purchase their cars solely from local, independent auto dealers. Removing these regulatory impediments may be essential to allow consumers access to new ways of shopping that have become available in many other industries.

This very question has been raised across the country, as a still-young car manufacturer, Tesla, pursues a direct-to-consumer sales strategy that does not rely on local, independent dealers.

Photo © CHARGED Electric Vehicles

FTC officials: States should allow Tesla direct sales

In this case and others, many state and local regulators have eliminated the direct purchasing option for consumers, by taking steps to protect existing middlemen from new competition. We believe this is bad policy for a number of reasons.

American consumers and businesses benefit from a dynamic and diverse economy where new technologies and business models can and have disrupted stable and stagnant industries, often by responding to unmet or under-served consumer needs. When that occurs in an industry long subject to extensive regulation, existing businesses - like automobile dealers - often respond by urging legislators or regulators to restrict or even bar the new firms that threaten to shake up their market.

Dealers contend that it is important for regulators to prevent abuses of local dealers. This rationale appears unsupported, however, with respect to blanket prohibitions of direct sales by manufacturers. And, in any event, it has no relevance to companies like Tesla. It has never had any independent dealers and reportedly does not want them.

FTC staff have commented on similar efforts to bar new rivals and new business models in industries as varied as wine sales, taxis, and health care. We have consistently urged legislators and regulators to consider the potential harmful consequences this can have for competition and consumers.

Regulators should differentiate between regulations that truly protect consumers and those that protect the regulated. We hope lawmakers will recognize efforts by auto dealers and others to bar new sources of competition for what they are - expressions of a lack of confidence in the competitive process that can only make consumers worse off.

”

APR 2014 57

CURRENTevents

First two BYD buses roll off US production line

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Photo courtesy of MTAPhotos/Flickr

The DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) has issued a funding opportunity announcement (DE-FOA-0001106) to award up to $10 million for projects to accelerate electrification of the cargo transport sector, a worthy mission that has been dubbed Zero Emission Cargo Transport (ZECT).

ZECT technologies are defined as those that produce zero emissions from a cargo-carrying vehicle for all or large portions of its duty cycle. The definition encompasses battery electric, hybrid, plug-in and fuel-cell vehicles.

Examples of ZECT technology include heavy-duty on-road trucks or locomotives powered by batteries, fuel cells, overhead catenary wires, or hybrid-electric technologies; or systems in roadbeds or rail lines that propel trucks or trains.

Award recipients will need to deploy and demonstrate a ZECT system over at least two years, during which they will have to collect a wide range of data, including detailed powertrain and battery operational data; vehicle speed, payload and auxiliary electrical loads; data on supporting infrastructure operation, including charge time and energy consumption; and vehicle operating and maintenance costs.

The DOE anticipates making two awards under this funding opportunity, which is open to local governments and private companies, with federal funds matched at a 50 percent cost share. The application submission deadline is June 11, 2014.

Photo courtesy of MoDOT Photos/Flickr

DOE funding Zero Emission Cargo Transport projects

BYD revealed its first pair of electric buses manufactured in California. “It’s a small beginning. A few buses. But like many things, it holds promise as something very big and very important,” said Governor Jerry Brown during a ceremony at the company’s manufacturing plant in Lancaster. “I hope to come back in a few years, when hundreds or maybe thousands of buses are rolling off the line.”

The new 40-foot buses are destined for the Antelope Valley Transit Authority, which plans to test the vehicles for the next several weeks before putting them into service as early as August 1. Buses must run a grueling gauntlet of safety and reliability tests before passengers are allowed to board.

BYD also has a deal to provide up to 25 electric buses to the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority. It had a contract with Long Beach Transit for 10 buses until that deal was canceled in March due to paperwork problems with the Federal Transit Administration. Long Beach officials plan to rebid the contract, and BYD will compete a second time for the business.

BYD, which is traded on the Hong Kong stock exchange, has established its North American headquarters in Los Angeles. Its Lancaster bus assembly plant is the first Chinese-owned factory to produce vehicles within the US, said BYD Vice President Michael Austin, who introduced himself as the company’s first American employee.

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THE VEHICLES

Mate Rimac, the 26-year old founder of Rimac Automobili, has plans that extend far beyond selling a few of the 1,088-horsepower beast called the Concept_One. “We have a long-term plan of creating subsequent generations of less expensive models with more and more volume,” Rimac told Tech.eu. “Our plan is to build about 80 - 100 units of the Concept_One and then move to other models with target volumes first in the hundreds and then in thousands of units.”

The Concept_One, which was introduced to the world at the 2011 Frankfurt Auto Show, has a liquid-cooled, permanent-magnet synchronous motor for each wheel.

It can do 100 km/h in 2.8 seconds, and has a maximum speed of 305 km/h and a range of 600 km. It sells for a cool million.

Rimac recently hooked up with a couple of investors to proceed with its ambitious plans, which also include marketing a line of electric bicycles under the Greyp brand.

Frank Kanayet Yepes, a prominent South American entrepreneur of Croatian origin, has decided to invest apCHARGED_l1PowerPost_print-ad-2.pdf 1 5/1/2014 10:19:53 AM

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Photo courtesy of Rimac Automobili

Croatian electric supercar startup secures funding

proximately a million dollars. “The company is in exactly the right place at the right time,” he said. “There are more than 800 million cars in the world, almost none of which are electric.”

Meanwhile, Sinocop Resources, a minerals and metals company listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange, has announced that it will buy 10 percent of the company for 5 million euros in cash and 2 million in stock.

“Money is coming not only from investors but also from customers,” said Mate Rimac. “We have six cars in the pipeline now, more than enough to keep us busy for a while.”

h wit

Q&A

IAN WRIGHT The founder and CEO of Wrightspeed on Tesla, gas turbines and electric trucks

Photo courtesy of Wrightspeed

By Charles Morris

THE VEHICLES

is originally from New Zealand.

He came to California in 1993, where he happened to be a neighbor of Tesla founder Martin Eberhard. He worked with optical switching systems at a company called Altamar Networks until it went out of business, then decided he wanted to start his own company.

Eberhard and his partner Marc Tarpenning had a practice of using fellow entrepreneurs as an audience to rehearse the pitches they developed for venture capitalists. The two listened to and critiqued Wright’s presentation for his optical subsystem startup, then gave him their pitch for Tesla.

Wright’s own startup never did get off the ground, but he found Eberhard and Tarpenning’s idea so interesting that he joined forces with them. Charged recently spoke with Wright about that historic hookup.

However, he played a major role in setting up two key partnerships for the company.

Ian Wright: The original conversation I had with Martin was over a beer at a party. He said, “my buddy and I are thinking of building very high performance electric sports cars. What do you think of that idea?” And I said, “I think you’re crazy! They’re only golf carts, aren’t they?”

Clearly, I was wrong. They were keen to get me to join up because I used to build and race sports cars as a hobby in Australia. I knew a bit more about how cars worked than they did. The tipping point for me was when Martin borrowed the tzero from AC Propulsion [see the interview with Tom Gage in our previous issue], and I got to drive it. That was the thing that persuaded me - although I wouldn’t want to buy that car, I could certainly see how you could make something new and interesting with electric drive.

Wright: We were pretty sure we were basing something on the Elise, if I could make the deal come together. We had three different people doing styling designs with the body, based on the Elise, and before I left, we chose one of those, and it happened to be a young guy [named Barney Hatt] at Lotus Engineering, whose design we liked the best and he went ahead and did the design of the Roadster.

Wright stayed with Tesla for only a year, leaving before the process of designing the Roadster really got going.

“

I learned a lot about how Lotus built cars, and was focused on setting up a deal where they would design us a car based on the Elise...

”

Wright: The first thing I did was sign up the license agreements with AC Propulsion for its motor and inverter technology. And the big thing for me, aside from hiring some engineers, was to set up the deal with Lotus.

I was in England every two weeks or so. I learned a lot about how Lotus built cars, and was focused on setting up a deal where they would design us a car based on the Elise and then produce it for us. We used an Elise for the first mule - we took out the gas engine and put in the AC Propulsion powertrain.

Charged: At that point, did you know exactly what you were going to be building?

Charged: Why did you leave Tesla so soon?

Wright: There are a number of reasons, of course, but I think on the most fundamental level, we didn’t have the same visions. Tesla was all about…doing everything they could to make sure that everybody’s driving an electric car. And I’m not really a true believer, unfortunately. I really liked the technology and I liked the fact that they were making very high performance electric cars. But they cost so much, and the idea that people were just going to pay for them because they should or because they’re electric, or to be green or something, I never really caught that.

When I left, I was going to go and build super high performance electric cars, but I couldn’t get funding for that, unfortunately - well, fortunately, actually. When you get rejected by these VCs, and they explain to you why

APR 2014 63

they don’t think your business model is any good, I think you can learn something from it. Eventually, I figured out probably the best application for the technology was in vehicles that use an awful lot more fuel than family cars do, so that would be trucks.

I’ve learned a lot from watching Tesla’s trials and tribulations from afar, and it was pretty clear that trying to build cars and car factories wasn’t as easy as we thought it was going to be. If you concentrate your effort on the powertrain only, then you can figure out a way to get the powertrain to market without having to build car factories and build cars. So, that convinced me to just do the powertrains, and do them for medium-duty trucks as repower kits. That’s a pretty different vision than Tesla’s.

Charged: Any entertaining anecdotes from that time?

“

I think Tesla has already changed the world in pretty important ways about the perception of EVs.

Wright: I learned a hell of a lot in the time I spent at Lotus Engineering in the UK. Lotus Engineering is one of the premiere auto engineering companies in the world when it comes to suspension design, tuning, ride and handling development. I remember being very humbled one day when they offered us a chance to drive on their test track with one of their development drivers. Those guys are unbelievably good.

Charged: So, that was an integral part of the Roadster’s ride and suspension. A lot of that stuff came from Lotus?

Wright: Yes, and they really are probably one of the best in the world for doing that sort of thing. You’d be surprised if you knew how many famous high performance cars they have given their treatment to - it’s just not advertised.

Charged: What would you say Tesla’s long-term impact will be?

Wright: It’s clear that they’ve made an enormous difference to public perception at a very wide range of levels.

Part of what we set out to do in the beginning was to change the public perception of electric cars, because the

64

public really did think like I did: They’re golf carts, aren’t they? That isn’t the public perception now at all. So, I think Tesla’s already changed the world in pretty important ways about the perception of EVs. Obviously, they’re trying to drive the costs further and further down and it’s tough, and I certainly wish them all the luck in the world with that. You have to say, to a large extent, that the Nissan LEAF and the Chevy Volt and the Ford EVs are all a reaction to what Tesla did, because if you go all the way back to 2003 when we started this thing, the California zero-emission mandates had just been repealed, all the EVs that were on the market then were taken off the market, the EV1s were taken back and crushed, and no major auto manufacturer was even talking about doing EVs. They were all running as far away from it as they could.

”

Charged: What about the way cars are developed or manufactured? Do you think Tesla has had an impact on that?

Wright: Yes. Perhaps not in the way that people might immediately think. The way that Toyota manufactures a car, the way they stamp the metal and weld them together and paint them and do all the interior bits and put the car together, it’s kind of hard to beat that. I’m not sure that Tesla’s made any advances on that, or even gotten to the level of doing that. On the other hand, if you’re a Silicon Valley technology engineer, and you look at the way modern cars are designed from an electronics and software point of view, to use an Australian expression, it looks like a dog’s breakfast. It doesn’t appear that they have what we would call a systems architecture. What they do is they go to their Tier 1 suppliers - they might go to Bosch and say, I need an electronic control unit for the ABS system, and then they go to somebody else and say, I want an entertainment system, I want a radio and DVD player and so on. I’m looking out the window at my 2008 Volkswagen Touareg, and I bet that’s got sixty or seventy electronic black boxes, probably three hundred pounds of wiring harness, and software from twenty different companies in it. The major reliability problem with those sorts of cars is the electronics and software. I think Tesla did take a real Silicon Valley systems architecture

Photos courtesy of pestoverd/Flickr

THE VEHICLES

perspective in designing all the electronics. I don’t know to what extent that way of doing things will translate to the big guys, but I think it is a very different way of doing it, and I expect that their electronics and software will wind up being quite a bit more reliable than what we’re used to in cars.

If you look at the user interface in my VW, it’s got a color LCD right there in the middle of the instrument cluster and it drives me crazy. There’s plenty of room to have lots of information on there, but they’ve divided it into a bunch of big fields. One of the fields gives you the outside air temperature. That’s good - I can always tell what the air temperature is outside until the low fuel warning goes off. When your low-fuel warning goes off, they overwrite the temperature with the low fuel warning icon and until you put more fuel in the car, you can no longer tell what the outside air temperature is. They could so easily have moved stuff around and put that somewhere else. They couldn’t do that because the way they developed things, there was a specific crew that did that, a specific piece of code, it’s done this way. So, that’s the sort of thing that Tesla gets right in their sleep, and the big guys really struggle with.

“

...It is a very different way of doing it and I expect that [Tesla’s] electronics and software will wind up being quite a bit more reliable than what we’re used to in cars.

”

APR 2014 65

Of the 2.2 million medium-duty trucks in the US, about 10 percent of those get a new powertrain every year.

�

Photos courtesy of Wrightspeed

“

THE VEHICLES Charged: Now that the majors are developing EVs, will that force them to make the electronics better?

“

own the trucks. We don’t have to go through the cycle of doing a deal with the truck manufacturer, getting the powertrain approved and all of that.

Of course, we can also go into new vehicles. The truck industry is very different from cars. The package-delivery guys, the way they buy those trucks is they go to, say, Freightliner, and they say, I want the MT45 chassis, and I want the Cummins engine, and I want an Allison transmission, and a Meritor axle, and I want you to ship all of that down to Michigan, to Spartan Motors, the UtiliMaster Group, and have them build a custom body on it. The fleet owner can just as easily say to Freightliner, well, I want the MT45 chassis, I want the UtiliMaster body, but I want the Wrightspeed powertrain.

We’re about the only range-extended powertrain, with the only retrofit kit.

We’ve now got a customer signed up to use a version of our powertrain in garbage trucks. The nice thing about garbage trucks is that they’ve got far and away the best drive cycle for us. We can save the most fuel. The average full-size garbage truck is doing about a thousand stops a day, and they’re hard stops - they’re triggering the ABS on most of the stops. They’re doing about 130 miles a day. They’re doing 2.8 miles per gallon. Putting our powertrain in there, we can save them about $35,000 a year in fuel per chassis, and another $8,000 in maintenance for the truck.

You can take out the diesel engine, the transmission, the rear axle, fuel system, instrument cluster, and replace the whole thing with our powertrain.

Wright: I think it can’t hurt.

I think they’ll still have the problem that they generally don’t develop any of that stuff themselves. They write a spec and they send it out to Tier 1 suppliers. If they’re still doing it that way, I think they’re still going to have a problem.

Charged: Tell us about what you’re doing with your company, Wrightspeed.

Wright: Our initial market is medium-duty trucks, so think of the package-delivery guys: FedEx, UPS, DHL. They can drive those trucks for a lot of years, and the engines and transmissions die, and they change over two or three times during the life of the truck. You can take out the diesel engine, the transmission, the rear axle, fuel system, instrument cluster, and replace the whole thing with our powertrain. When you’re done, then you’ve got basically an electric truck with a range extender generator, and in our case it’s a gas turbine, and the turbine will happily burn natural gas, or diesel or biodiesel. Suddenly, instead of getting eight or ten miles to the gallon, you’re getting 25 or 30, depending on your drive cycle.

Of the 2.2 million medium-duty trucks in the US [Class 3 to 6, 11,000 to 26,000 pounds], about 10 percent of those get a new powertrain every year. That’s 250,000 new engines and transmissions per year. That varies a lot - in the parts of the country where they salt the roads heavily in the winter, they don’t get twenty years out of the chassis, so you might actually not replace the engine in one of those trucks.

In California, that chassis might be good for thirty years and they go through three engines, or even more.

The interesting thing is that we can sell directly to the fleet operator, the guys who

”

Charged: Your powertrain includes a micro-turbine generator. Tell me more about that.

“

Suddenly, instead of getting eight or ten miles to the gallon, you’re getting 25 or 30, depending on your drive cycle.

”

Wright: It’s an engine that burns fuel and drives an electric generator that charges the battery. The interesting thing about a generator duty cycle for an engine is that it’s pretty hard work. If you want to run the engine at its most efficient speed and load, it’s actually

APR 2014 67

“

If you want to run the engine at its most efficient speed and load, it’s actually pretty hard on the engine.

”

“ 68

If you use a gas turbine for the engine, then suddenly it all changes...[It] will run 40,000 hours at full power.

”

Photos courtesy of Wrightspeed

Wrightspeed’s Geared Traction Drive

pretty hard on the engine. If you were to take a little 4-cylinder car engine, they usually run about 5,000 hours for a car, so most of the time they’re not working very hard. If you take one of those engines and put it on a generator at wide open throttle and full power, you’ll be lucky to get five hundred hours out of it. If you look at stationary generators, conventional piston ones, a 30 kW stationary diesel generator will have a 4-cylinder Cummins engine, it will run 1,800 rpm, it’ll weigh 2,000 pounds and it’ll run for 10,000 hours at full power. That’s way too big and heavy to put in a vehicle.

However, if you use a gas turbine for the engine, then suddenly it all changes.

They run very much faster - the one we use runs at 96,000 rpm. The 30 kW generator assembly is about as big as a one-liter bottle of Coke. And the engine itself isn’t much bigger. That engine doesn’t have a lubrication system, it runs on air bearings and there’s only one moving part. So, that engine will run 40,000 hours at full power.

That’s a big deal. The thing weighs 220 pounds in total, so it’s about ten percent of the weight of a stationary engine and it’s got at least four times the life of the heavy ones and forty times the life of the light ones.

The next big deal about the turbine is that they are amazingly clean engines. The one we’re using now beats

THE VEHICLES the current California emission standards by a factor of ten... without any after-treatment. Not even a muffler.

Meeting the emission standards in California with a diesel truck engine is becoming harder and harder, and more and more expensive. Some of our customers are no longer using diesel truck engines in California in their medium-duty trucks. They’re going back to gasoline V8s.

They’re burning 40 percent more fuel and they only last half as long as a diesel engine, but it’s still better than trying to meet CARB standards. They could tighten the standards quite a lot from where we are and we would have no trouble meeting them.

The worst thing about turbines is that they’re only efficient at full power. At idle power, the fuel flow is like 30 to 50 percent of the fuel flow at full power. With a normal diesel engine, when you idle, it’s maybe burning two to five percent of what it would be at full power.

That’s the big difference with turbines. You can’t just put one in a car because, in a car’s duty cycle, most of the time you’re using very little power. An average family car has 250 horsepower [but most of the time] they’re probably only using about 25 to 50 horsepower.

“

you order it for gaseous fuels, then you can burn natural gas, compressed natural gas, liquefied natural gas, propane or landfill gas. The combustion process in the turbine is very different from in a piston engine.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking they’re more efficient, they’re actually not. Absolute efficiency is not one of the strong points of turbines. It’s fairly hard to get them to be as efficient as a piston engine. The ways that the turbine beats the piston engine hands down are power-to-weight ratio, durability at full power, emissions and maintenance. There’s no lubrication system, there are no cooling system, no belts, no hoses and no maintenance on the engine except the air filter. Where we gain efficiency is the fact that it’s a series hybrid, and therefore we can run the engine only at its most efficient point.

The ways that the turbine beats the piston engine hands down are power-to-weight ratio, durability at full power, emissions and maintenance.

Charged: So, the turbine engine only makes sense in a truck if you have an electrified powertrain?

Wright: Correct. If you use it in a series hybrid or a range-extended EV like we do…it’s running at a constant speed and load. When it’s finished charging the battery, it shuts off. So you get all your power from the battery, and that whole process is really efficient in electric drivetrains. We can completely decouple the engine load from the road load and the electric battery takes care of the road load, the engine is driving the generator and charging the battery and we just keep it at the sweet spot.

Charged: Your turbine can burn different types of fuel?

Wright: Yes, actually the same turbine. When you buy one, you choose whether you want it with liquid fuel [diesel or biodiesel] or you want it with gaseous fuel. If

Charged: So, it’s the hybrid system that gives you your efficiency gains, not the actual turbine? Is that what offers fleet operators the huge fuel savings?

Wright: Yes. The medium-duty truck fleet in the US is spending $35 billion a year on fuel. If you look at a company like UPS… their total fuel bill was $4 billion.

Some of that is air traffic and some is long haul, but some of it is medium-duty trucks.

The price of fuel went up by a dollar a gallon, and their bottom line went down by a billion dollars. So, if we could save a reasonable percentage of that fuel, it would be worth some pretty serious capital investment on their part.

The big fleets have tried all the stuff. They’ve tried the hybrids and the electric trucks and they’ve been pretty unhappy with all of it so far. They’re a little bit cynical.

They want to make sure it works. You also have to be careful about picking the right drive cycle. You’ve got to be able to save enough fuel and maintenance per year to make the capital investment worthwhile for the customer.

For example, the package-delivery guys delivering in Manhattan - that truck will only do six miles a day because the poor sucker that drives it finds a parking spot somewhere, then he gets out and hand-delivers packages and spends the next two hours running. Also, the long-

”

APR 2014 69

Photo courtesy of Wrightspeed

“

haul guys - we can’t help them Wright: You can go a long You can go a long way very much either, because their way further with the control further with the control big rigs are out on the interstate aspect of high performance aspect of high performance electric cars. There have been at 62 miles an hour, straight electric cars. road. We don’t get the regen a few prototypes built now braking gain because they’re Mercedes has built one and not starting and stopping, we don’t get the plug-in gain there are a couple of others, where they run high power because they can’t carry enough batteries. They’re going motors, one per wheel. We’ve just got a patent approved 400 or 500 miles a day and we can do maybe only 40 on for how we do that, and it’s quite different from how the the battery. Now, big rigs that are used for delivering to other guys are doing it. One of the problems with conyour local Safeway, they’re a good target. Garbage trucks ventional high performance cars is that people buy them are the best drive cycle. If you pick the right drive cycle, and they think they’re racing drivers, but they’re not, and then it’s a compelling economic case. they get themselves into trouble. I think with the way we do the slip control of the tires…you can make cars very Charged: Looking at the future of EVs, is there some much safer for the average driver. I think that people story that’s not being told? Something people are miss- haven’t really figured out yet that the control aspect is ing? so much better than what you can get with a traditional

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”

THE VEHICLES powertrain. Once you start seeing cars on the road that have that, everyone’s going to want it.

Charged: It sounds like you firmly believe the plug-in, or range-extended vehicle, is the way to go.

Wright: It depends what problem you’re trying to solve and what the use for the vehicle is. If you want to make electric vehicles today, with today’s fuel and battery prices, to make economic sense, then range-extended is the way to go.

the other hand, are pretty volatile and continually go up. I think in order to get to that tipping point, we’d have to see fuel prices up to about $11 a gallon, then suddenly, EVs make more sense than range-extended EVs for a bunch of applications. But for $3 or $4 a gallon, range-extended is the way to go.

Electrification Evolution

Charged: Do you think that’s going to change in the future?

How long do you think before the batteries get cheaper and the pure EV comes into its own?

Wright: Two big factors are battery cost and fuel price. There’s actually a tipping point - if batteries get below a certain price and fuel goes up in price, then suddenly the pure EV is more compelling than the rangeextended EV, because it’s now cheaper to have more batteries than to have a generator for certain applications. But I have no faith in the idea that we’re going to put in a new infrastructure for fast charging or battery swapping - we can’t even afford to fix the potholes in the road! But the fueling system’s already out there for diesel and gasoline, so I think range-extended is going to be the thing for a very, very long time if you need the range. People talk about decreases in battery cost, but it’s not happening, and I think it’s unlikely to happen for a bunch of good reasons. Fuel prices, on

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The Fleet Sweet Spot The team at Echo Automotive has been as busy as the work vans that it aims to reinvent. The company has demonstrated its EchoDrive plug-in hybrid system at several major fleet industry events, including the Work Truck Show, where it won the 2013 Editors’ Choice Award for most innovative product and the 2014 Green Award.

By Charles Morris

Image courtesy of Echo Automotive

T

he commercial fleet market is one of the most exciting frontiers in the electromobility revolution, not only because of the enormous potential for fuel savings, but because it offers opportunities for a smaller company, which can hope to carve out a lucrative niche developing a powertrain solution, without the need to build the sort of massive manufacturing and marketing infrastructure that an OEM in the passenger car market needs.

Charged has covered several of the companies greedily eying this market (including Wrightspeed, covered in Q&A with Ian Wright, in this issue). All of these firms are trying to find the “sweet spot,” but Echo Automotive (OTCQB: ECAU) has a unique proposition: it has developed a “bolt-on” solution that’s designed to offer fleet operators increased efficiency and lower operating costs with a minimum of installation hassle. Charged sat down with Echo Chairman Jason Plotke and talked about the company’s strategy.

APR 2014 73

“

Echo recently acquired We went down the list of it doesn’t actually save money.” the assets and intellectual So Echo has made it a point to what we call barriers or property of Bright Automoshow fleet owners very clearly risks, from a commercial how electrification is going to tive, and finished building a nationwide installation and save them money, and to minifleet perspective, and service infrastructure that mize the risks (both actual and tried to mitigate them includes Meineke, Dickperceived) of making an equipdown to almost nil. inson Fleet Services and ment change. “We went down Leggett & Platt. The compathe list of what we call barriers ny also finalized a supply agreement with motor builder or risks, from a commercial fleet perspective, and tried to Remy International, which includes the development of mitigate them down to almost nil. What that left us was, an induction motor system called the Echo Induction how can we take an electrification product, and apply it Machine, which Echo will assemble and distribute to to an existing vehicle [in such a way that] it allows you other OEMs and integrators. to use most of the same architecture, but creates tremenIn early 2014, the company announced sales of Echodous efficiency in the process?”

Drive to several customers, including a research instituEcho’s solution doesn’t require the customer to buy tion and a municipality, which are now participating in a new vehicle, or even a new powertrain. It’s a plug-in the company’s beta program and will deploy EchoDrive hybrid modification to a standard drivetrain. “We have production units later in the year. At current capaca very elegantly simple solution that gives the most bang ity, Echo could produce around ten thousand kits per for the buck,” says Plotke. “I can’t tell you I’ll give you the year. most efficiency, but I’ll tell you I can give you the best Through his experience with an earlier company, ROI - between three and four years, depending on the Plotke learned that, as he puts it, “Green is a tough sell if drive cycle and the load of the vehicle.”

”

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Images courtesy of Echo Automotive

THE VEHICLES

“

We have a very elegantly simple solution that gives the most bang for the buck.

”

The EchoDrive system consists of an induction motor, which is installed on the post side of the transmission, and a 9.4 kWh lithium-ion battery pack, which goes in the location of the spare tire carrier. No cutting or welding is necessary for installation. “We simply unbolt the cover, unbolt the driveshaft, slide our motor on, bolt it up where the existing cover was, and reinstall the original driveshaft back in the same location,” explains Plotke.

“Our Level 1 and 2 charger, system controller, inverter and energy storage are all contained in that pack, so there’s not a number of installation points on the vehicle, there’s essentially just a couple. Now, we do have some harness connections, we plug in and listen to what the vehicle is doing and we augment our performance based on that. It’s really simple, and if that vehicle had to be put back to its original configuration, our products uninstall as easily as they install.”

EchoDrive employs both passive and non-passive regenerative braking. The system includes a regen lever that mounts underneath the steering column. “It’s similar to what Cadillac has just put out in their ELR model, although ours can modulate the level of braking, whereas in the Cadillac it’s on or off. It allows us to capture the maximum amount of regen possible. It also controls the brake lights. Like the Cadillac, it won’t take the vehicle to a complete stop, so it still needs the friction brake to actually stop the vehicle.”

Unlike many hybrid powertrains, EchoDrive does not run in fully electric mode, but rather provides assistance to the entire drive cycle. “For example, you hit the gas

and, instead of the internal combustion engine doing all the work, we subsidize that energy load with about fifty percent of the load coming from our drive. The vehicle thinks it’s going downhill because there’s this alternate drivetrain system that’s propelling the vehicle in addition to the motor. We’re not able to operate the vehicle in EV mode, but we can run that power up to seventy miles an hour, and can even assist on the freeway, whereas others would flop from internal combustion over to electric or vice versa.”

Echo claims a fifty percent increase in miles per gallon. “We were just at the NTEA Show last week, where we had a ride-and-drive. We actually did a contest with a third-party fleet analytics company, to measure the performance of each one of these drivers and compare it against a baseline that they achieved with the vehicle without the system. The highest, with an untrained driver, was 58 percent, and the lowest was 42 with a little more training.”

EchoDrive is designed to be installed in four to six hours. “It’s not much more complicated than changing brakes, and it’s not as complicated as changing a transmission. So, there are a lot of fleets that actually put their own motors and transmissions in that would easily be able to handle this type of work. In case a fleet doesn’t have that ability, we’ve partnered with a number of service providers that have hundreds of outlets nationwide to facilitate not only the installation, but any potential service that would arise from that.”

Of course, different fleets use their vans in very dif-

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Image courtesy of Echo Automotive

ferent ways, and how much a particular fleet can save depends on its typical drive cycle. As part of its sales process, Echo will install a data recorder in a potential customer’s vehicle, record the drive cycle, and plug the data into a simulation, which generates a detailed estimate of the possible savings. “There are scenarios where, if you got out on the freeway in the morning and drove a hundred miles to a destination and turned around and came back, then our system would not provide very much value to you, because we need a lot of start and stop…We start with a high level of efficiency and we taper off as our pack depletes. After that, we still continue to operate as a hybrid, which gives us about a 20 to 22 percent increase in efficiency. So, even if you went outside

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your drive cycle for any given time, you would still have a significant amount of savings beyond just what the [plugin advantage] could provide. We have awesome Level 2 charging, so, if the driver stops at Starbucks and uses what we call opportunistic charging, he can gain another 25 to 30 miles.”

EchoDrive records not only its own performance, but also the efficiency of the vehicle. “One of the things that we incorporated into the vehicle is a screen that mounts into the dash that provides feedback. Are they maximizing their regen? Are they accelerating too much? Are they idling too long? We help tailor their driving habits to drive more efficiently. All that information is contained in our system and we have the ability to report that back

THE VEHICLES

“

...you’re asking about fifty percent less of the engine and the brakes, so you can increase the life of that vehicle.

”

to the fleet in the evening or at the end of the week, so that the fleet operator or manager can take a report from his ten, fifty or a hundred drivers and say, ‘Hey, so-andso performed very well this week.’ It’s almost become a game. We’re also able to report that the vehicle has a check engine light on or it’s up for service. So, there’s a lot of ancillary value that comes with our system.”

Echo’s products are 100 percent made in the USA. Corporate headquarters are in Scottsdale, Arizona and development and production facilities are in Anderson, Indiana, where the battery packs are assembled, using cells from an as-yet-undisclosed provider. The company also collaborated with Remy to develop a proprietary induction motor.

Echo aims to home in on the electrification sweet spot.

Of course, so do a number of fleet-focused companies - like VIA Motors, XL Hybrids, Smith Electric, Motiv Power Systems, Boulder EVs, Wrightspeed and others but no one else is doing exactly what Echo does. “[Some companies] get you a hundred miles per gallon, and can run you around in EV mode, but that comes at a high financial penalty. You’ve got to start with a brand new vehicle, which is going to be $30,000-$35,000, and then install a kit…that comes at a very high price.” “[Others are using non-plug-in hybrids] that claim up to twenty-five percent efficiency, and they’re pretty expensive for that increase in efficiency, so their ROI is definitely longer than ours. I think that the plug-in offering at our price point gives you a lot more electric energy usage and offsets a lot more fuel consumption.”

Echo is shooting for a three- to four-year ROI period, and has done case studies that show how much money a fleet owner can save over the life of the vehicles. According to Plotke, the largest fleet owners such as FedEx, UPS and Coca-Cola are keeping their vehicles longer and longer. “Some of those companies are keeping those vehicles for ten, eleven, twelve years. One of the things that’s nice about EchoDrive is that you’re asking about fifty percent less of the engine and the brakes, so you can increase the life of that vehicle.”

Plotke estimates the savings on an average drive cycle at about $3,000 a year at current fuel prices. EchoDrive is designed to last for ten years. “If the fuel price stayed static, you’re looking at a $30,000 savings over the life of our kit. If fuel happens to go up in ten years, which I think all of us would believe to be the case, then you could see savings as high as $40,000-$45,000.”

There are a couple of other advantages to Echo’s unique bolt-on approach. “In the event of a collision in which the vehicle is totaled, or if the vehicle’s retired, our system can easily be unbolted and transferred to another vehicle,” says Plotke. EchoDrive also features what he calls graceful failure. “With any of our competitors, if their system were to fail, your vehicle becomes inoperable. If our system were to fail, we simply have an override switch where you turn it off and the vehicle continues to drive in its original configuration, because we haven’t modified anything in the existing drivetrain. You’ll lose efficiency until you get the system serviced, but that’s the least of your worries as opposed to having someone stranded. We’ve really done a lot to mitigate risks, and that’s a big one.”

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Buckeye

Bullet Student-built vehicles from The Ohio State University hold the records for all the highest levels of electric land speed racing, and the team’s not done yet.

By Michael Kent

Photo courtesy of Ohio State University

The

A

s it stands today, Ohio State’s Buckeye Bullet 1 holds the US record speed for battery electric vehicles (BEVs) at 314.958 mph, its Venturi Buckeye Bullet 2 holds the world record for hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles at 302.877 mph, and the Venturi Buckeye Bullet 2.5 holds the world record for BEVs at 307.666 mph.

Next stop for these seriously fast student-built racecars: the 400 Club.

The Center for Automotive Research Twenty-two years ago, Ohio State University formed the Center for Automotive Research (CAR) as a multidiscipline entity under the College of Engineering.

Funded by industry-sponsored research and public sources, CAR brings together students and faculty at the university to work on engineering, business and public policy automotive projects.

“I think what’s really special about what we do,

especially if you look at other schools, is that we take people interested in the automotive world out of all these departments and bring them together,” Ohio State’s David Cooke told Charged. “So you see a lot more full-vehicle projects implementing lots of new technologies on one platform.”

Cooke is the captain of the Venturi Buckeye Bullet (VBB) racing team, and started working on the project about six years ago as a mechanical engineering undergraduate student.

At CAR, Ohio State works with essentially every major vehicle OEM and Tier 1 supplier - about 30 to 40 companies have regular research contracts. “Our whole center runs because of our industry partners,” said David Emerling, Industry Collaborations Director at CAR. “Without them, we wouldn’t exist. It’s about a $10 million dollar per year center in research projects and around one third of those are industry-sponsored.”

THE VEHICLES

Electric achievements The history of electric racing at Ohio State dates back over two decades to a competitive collegiate series called Formula Lightning in 1993. The cars were open-wheel spec chassis, powered by 31 lead-acid batteries. About 20 universities participated, and Ohio State was able to establish a pretty early dominance. “They won every national championship that the series had,” said Cooke.

“There were three years when the series had a seasonlong national points championship and Ohio State has all of those trophies.”

In about the year 2000, interest in that series dwindled.

Lead-acid tech hadn’t really improved much, so the races were really short. When some of the main sponsors pulled out, the series fell apart.

At Ohio State, the group of student research engineers decided to go in a different direction. As the story goes, at the goodbye dinner with the sponsors from the formula series, a representative from the motor manufacturer asked, “How fast has an electric car gone?” That question is what started everything Ohio State has done for the last 14 years.

The students began to look at what the performance

80

envelope was on an EV, and found that at that time it was about 245 mph. The group took their mathematicalmodel knowledge and built computer simulations to estimate what it would take to beat that record. They took the results to Dr Giorgio Rizzoni, an up-and-coming professor at the time who is now the director of CAR. “He will tell you that he was hesitant when they first came to him,” explains Cooke. “He said, ‘You guys have taken my system dynamics class, put the work in and prove to me this can be done.’ That’s exactly what they did. The team stayed on him and proved the engineering case until he came in full support of it. That’s when they decided to go after the land speed record for EVs.”

“

He said, ‘You guys have taken my system dynamics class, put the work in and prove to me this can be done.’ That’s exactly what they did.

”

BB1 The first iteration of the Buckeye Bullet (BB1) was developed in the early 2000s. Powered by nickel-metal hydride batteries, it set the US land speed record in 2004 at 314.958 mph. “That was the first attempt at a car. It

did the job and was an amazing thing to do,” said Cooke.

“But there was a lot learned - like the first time you do anything, there are a thousand things you want to do differently.”

In 2005, the team started discussing what to do next, and decided that BB1 was not safe to go any faster. It was

Photos courtesy of Ohio State University

The motorsport-research connection Ohio State’s motorsport projects - like the Buckeye Bullet program - are essentially after-school clubs. They’re something students get involved in because they want to.

However, these clubs are co-located at CAR, which leads to a lot of industrial partnerships, research questions and new projects that develop out of these “hobby” racing activities.

“CAR holds its advisory board meeting with research partners every six months, and at that time we always present what’s going on in our motorsport projects,” said Cooke. “Some people who attend these meetings are pretty high up in engineering design management at different companies. For example, once I ended up at a table with Abe Shocket, who is an engineering director at TE Connectivity. He asked what we were using for high-voltage connections and contactors on the VBB. I told him we were having trouble finding a good solution, and he offered to help. So, that’s a huge benefit to colocation. The primary product of the teams is students - and a lot of students who work on the motorsport projects eventually end up doing graduate work for these companies.”

The Bonneville Speedway is one of the few places in North America where land speed record events can be hosted.

Land speed racing The basic concept of land speed racing is a lot like drag racing, except that the track is much longer, and vehicles race one at a time. There is no single organization for validation and regulation, and hundreds of classes exist based on things like engine size, levels of power, fuel type, whether the vehicle is production or custom, etc.

Records are standardized as the speed over a course of fixed length. In general, there is about five to six miles of acceleration, then each pass is timed over a mile and the average is taken for two attempts in opposite directions within one hour. A new record must exceed the previous one by at least one percent to be validated.

The Bonneville Speedway - an area near Wendover, Utah - is one of the few places in North America where land speed record events can be hosted. It’s a dried-up lake bed that floods every winter. When the water dries in the summer, a very flat and tightly-packed salt surface is revealed. It’s a huge area that covers about 50 square miles, perfect for attempting to drive hundreds of miles per hour.

At Bonneville, there are a couple big racing events each year. The one that is the most well-known is Speed Week, usually in August, where racers attempt to break US records (world records are regulated separately). At Speed Week there are many different vehicles - mostly gas-powered - including bicycles, motorcycles, semitrucks, production cars, streamliners (the category the VBB competes in) and others.

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THE VEHICLES

VBB2 A growing area for advanced vehicle powertrain was hydrogen fuel cells. There was a lot of new activity within the auto industry, and the technology had advanced by leaps and bounds in recent years.

That led the team to kick off a new fuel cell development project in 2006. Working with new partners like Ford, which was doing a lot of fuel cell research and integration; Ballard Power Systems, experts in proton exchange membrane fuel cell technology; and the lead sponsor, Venturi Automobiles, which lent its name to the new speed racer: Venturi Buckeye Bullet 2.

It all began with a Ballard fuel cell system originally fitted to a city bus. That system was designed at around 250 kW. When the Ohio State group was done modifying it, they were able to push it to over 600 kW, or 800 hp.

“One magazine said we were the first to hot-rod a fuel cell,” said Cooke. “We didn’t care about longevity. We wanted to get the highest possible power for one minute, with full knowledge that it was destroying itself.” The idea is very similar to what you would see at the drag strip,

82

with a lot of parallels to getting more power out of a gasburner, like increasing operating pressures and upping the flow rates to inject more fuel.

After three years of an intense powertrain engineering program to get every ounce of power possible, the team was able to make the city bus fuel cell think it was a

“

One magazine said we were the first to hot-rod a fuel cell... We wanted to get the highest possible power for one minute, with full knowledge that it was destroying itself.

”

race car. Originally designed to do 70 mph, in 2009 the VBB2’s powertrain pushed the car to a new world record for fuel cells at 302.877 mph.

With another record under its belt, the team went back to the drawing board. “In 2009, we found ourselves in the same kind of place we were in 2005,” explained Cooke.

“The car had done what it could do. We asked ourselves, ‘If we build a whole new fuel cell car, what could we do to advance the technology?’ The answer was that we’d pretty much be doing the same thing, with some small tweaks and minor upgrades.”

The team found that while they were working on fuel cells for four or five years, Li-ion batteries had come a long way. Lithium technology went from a dream future technology to a viable option. Li-ion batteries were still expensive, but were available in larger formats for the first time, with power characteristics that were good for racing.

VBB2.5 Along with Li-ion technology, a lot of progress had been made in motor and inverter systems. In late 2009, the students decided to start designing a new ground-up battery-powered speed demon, with all the latest and greatest in powertrain technology.

At that time, Ohio State had a new group of students and researchers who hadn’t worked on the first

Photos courtesy of Ohio State University

designed for 300 mph, and at 315 mph they were starting to see signs that the vehicle had reached its limits. It was pushing the limitations of the tires, and it started to have problems with parachute deployment at high speeds because of the aerodynamics of the vehicle. So, they decided it was time to retire the BB1 and began to discuss how to power the next iteration of the vehicle.

Nickel-metal hydride battery technology had not advanced very much, so they looked elsewhere. Lithiumion batteries started to pop up in consumer electronics, but they were very new, only available in small form factors and incredibly expensive. The team didn’t think it was realistic to try to power the next race car with Li-ion at that time.

Recruiting pipeline

In addition to really fast cars, Ohio State’s intense research projects also churn out top-quality engineering graduates.

“Instead of design projects ending only in white papers, we go out and build it, test it and solve problems,” said Cooke. “The result is that you get some pretty useful students that have hands-on experience making things that have to work. It is a missing component from a lot of the educational tracks.”

As a result, Ohio State’s partnerships with industry sponsors are a two-way street. The motorsport teams gain access to top-notch products and funding, while the sponsors build relationships with some of the brightest new recruits.

“One of the best ways we’ve been able to build our internal team is by forming relationships with organizations like The Ohio State University,” Chadwick Taylor told Charged. Taylor is a Senior Manager of Business Development for Hybrid and Electric Mobility Solutions at TE Connectivity, a sponsor of VBB3. “It’s a great pipeline for recruiting, and, at the same time, we’re able to utilize their resources as a research institution to help make TE products better.”

In the electric and hybrid industry, there is a very real need for more qualified engineering talent. “The players in [the EV Industry] are very focused on expanding their skillsets,” said Ajay Bhargava, Senior Manager and Global Product Line Manager for Electric and Hybrid Vehicles at TE Connectivity. “The players in this segment are now making long-term commitments, and you need a pipeline of engineers and engineering teams that understand the high-voltage products, just not the lowvoltage products. In addition, this knowledge needs to be transferred across the organization - not just a few engineers within a functional group.”

“The auto industry is definitely changing, and it’s for the better,” added Taylor. “Now the OEMs want electric and hybrid powertrains to be offered as an option, rather than a niche standalone vehicle. That’s driving components to be smaller and less expensive, and that all comes from innovation on the engineering team. We can see that all the OEMs, and their top suppliers, are trying to attract the best talent to help drive the market in that direction.”

In addition to helping the Ohio State team with highvoltage connectors and contactors, TE supplies parts for the Chevrolet Volt, Ford Focus Electric, Fiat 500E, Tesla and EVs from “other German and Japanese automakers.”

“

It’s a great pipeline for recruiting, and, at the same, we’re able to utilize their resources as a research institution to help make TE products better.

”

Initially focused on handling higher voltage and higher currents, the company has now diversified its product family to cover anything from mild hybrids to full/plugin hybrids to BEVs. “Our goal was to have off-the-shelf products for all customers,” said Bhargava.

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THE VEHICLES generation battery-powered BB1. As a stepping stone to a brand new build, they decided to use VBB2’s platform, rip out all the hydrogen components and begin testing new batteries in it. “We said, before we try to build the ultimate land speed car, let’s try to improve our skills,” explained Cooke. “We went back to the Bonneville Speedway in 2010 with the same car, but with a new motor, inverter, batteries and control system in it. We dubbed that car the VBB2.5. It was really just a test platform.”

Land speed racing records are governed by different organizations, and there are many different classifications. The team was able to pitch VBB2.5 to new sponsors because the original battery-powered BB1 only set the US record, not the world record, which has racing trials held at a different event.

The world record for a battery electric vehicle was still only about 240 mph. The Ohio State team took that to sponsors and said, “Give us a year of expensive testing, but a year that would help us really learn for the next car, and we can bring home a battery record with this test mule.” Sure enough, in 2010 the vehicle was able to set an FIA-sanctioned world record at 307.666 mph.

VBB3 and the Four Club “When we sat around the room and did the ‘what’s next?’ thing, we thought, ‘we have all these records, where do we go from here?’” said Cooke. “We were proud of what we had done, but the context in the press is always, ‘Wow, that’s really fast for a student group’ or ‘Wow, that’s fast for an EV.’ So the question in the room was: ‘What will it take to be really fast, period?’”

In land speed racing, the first digit tends to be the most important. If you go 299 mph you’re in the “Two Club.”

One mph higher and you’re in the Three Club. Naturally, the ambitious Buckeyes set their sights on the Four Club.

“The answer is that all the fastest guys in the world have broken 400 mph,” explained Cooke. “The Four Club is what we wanted to get into. It’s about 80 mph faster than what we did before, so we went to the drawing board to see what that would take.”

A 300 mph car is a fast car, and takes a lot of power.

But if you look at vehicles that break 300 mph, you find that they’re usually using production-type parts pushed to their limits and integrated in special ways. That’s generally true for all types of powertrains - gas, electric, everything. When you get up to the 400 mph barrier, the

84

“

The answer is that all the fastest guys in the world have broken 400 mph... It’s about 80 mph faster than what we did before, so we went to the drawing board to see what that would take.

”

parts have to be custom. “You don’t go to a hot-rod shop, buy a V8 and tune it differently,” said Cooke. “Typically you’re building your own powertrain to do exactly what you need. The same is true in the electric world.”

The team’s idea was to fill up whiteboards with everything learned from previous years, take mental notes of it all, then wipe the boards clean and start fresh.

Every component of the VBB3 vehicle was going to have to be new and optimized for the mission.

From 2010 to late 2012, they spent their time designing components and doing system-level testing to find out how the parts would interact. “We told our team, ‘Take the best parts that are off-the-shelf. Look at the spec sheet to note what it says, then throw it away and test the heck out of them to see where they actually fail.’ It’s not until we understand how things break that we understand what we need to do to make them better,” said Cooke.

Ohio State’s main partner, Venturi Automobiles, is closely involved with development, and it’s primarily responsible for the motor and controller. Venturi is a French company that’s interested in innovative designs and projects that dispel false perceptions about EVs things like range, charging and speed limitations. It’s involved with many different races and demonstrations around the world that display just how capable EVs can be.

As the manufacturer for the motor and drive for the VBB3, Venturi worked with Ohio State to develop a custom configuration: two permanent-magnet AC motors end-to-end on a common shaft with a special cooling system that integrates both motors. Each axle has a dual-motor system currently capable of about 1,000 hp, and the team thinks there is room to improve up to

Six of those graduate students were rollovers from undergrad who “didn’t want to leave - a common theme around here,” said Cooke.

Photos courtesy of Ohio State University

The students Normally, most of Ohio State’s motorsport teams are made up of undergraduate students. But so many people have been involved with the VBB programs that the team now includes seven graduate students as well.

Six of those graduate students were rollovers from undergrad who “didn’t want to leave - a common theme around here,” said Cooke. Those students are required to develop a thesis on their section of vehicle design. At the moment, there is thesis development work in aerodynamics, control systems, modeling systems, data acquisition, suspension design, motor and inverter testing, and battery control systems and testing. The seven students are working on eight papers. When they’re finished defending each thesis, in about two

years, the plan is to compile them into a very detailed 1,000-page-plus book on the design and development of the VBB3.

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“

The big challenge for this car is that we’ve gone to a tremendous amount more power than we’ve ever worked with.

”

that have really good characteristics,” said Cooke. “But the problem is that the highest discharge rates usually allow 10 C or 20 C, meaning 4 or 5 minutes is the fastest you could extract all of the energy from those batteries.

No matter what size it is, you can’t take it to empty in a minute. That’s what’s really special about the A123 cells we’re using - they let us drain the battery to the minimum state-of-charge really quickly, meaning the weight that we have on-board is useful.”

Lithium-ion batteries have a really flat voltage curve, which means the voltage is relatively steady until the upper and lower state-of-charge limits. The problem for this vehicle is that in the last 10 to 15 percent stateof-charge, the voltage falls off a cliff, and the end of the run is when the highest voltage is needed to produce maximum motor power. “We don’t want to be in that last 10 to 20 percent for performance reasons,” said Cooke. “So, we only discharge these batteries to about 80 percent.”

Photos courtesy of Ohio State University

about 1,400 hp. “The eventual goal is just over 1 MW of power on each axle, which is about 1,400 hp,” said Cooke.

“The big challenge for this car is that we’ve gone to a tremendous amount more power than we’ve ever worked with. We were at the point on the previous vehicle where we were starting to slip the front wheels with so much torque. When you’re at the traction limit on an axle, the only thing you can do to get more power to the ground is start to power the other axle, so this is our first 4-wheel drive car.”

VBB3 has some unique power requirements: it uses a huge amount of energy in a one-minute-long sprint.

This falls into a weird area between the capabilities of supercapacitors and batteries. “Battery companies said, ‘You want to extract all the energy in one minute? That’s a supercap.’” Cooke explained. “But then the supercap guys said, ‘We can give you that energy for 10 seconds. A minute is forever. Go talk to the battery guys.’”

The battery packs the team chose for the VBB3, which are designed to deliver that staggeringly high 1 MW of power to each axle, use cells from A123 with a very specialized chemistry. They’re not A123’s regular production cells - in fact, this is the first test application for the new technology, which has “amazing power characteristics.”

The entire capacity of the on-board batteries is about 90 kWh. The system is designed to use every bit of energy possible, because any that remains in the batteries at the end of the run is, essentially, extra weight. “We could go buy tons of lithium cells from a lot of different companies

“

That’s what’s really special about the A123 cells we’re using - they let us drain the battery to the minimum stateof-charge really quickly, meaning the weight that we have on-board is useful.

”

Another big challenge for the design team is the complexity of all the interacting systems. The previous vehicles each had one battery pack, or fuel cell unit, one motor and one drive. On the VBB3, the batteries are split into eight different packs, because of the power levels, which feed four different inverters driving four motors.

There is one supervisory controller communicating with all the different sub-system controllers to balance and manage their interactions. “There is a lot of tweaking and tuning and making sure everything plays well together,” said Cooke.

400 and beyond In 2013, after two years of design and testing, the team assembled the VBB3 under a very tight schedule to make

it in time for the short Bonneville racing window that happens every year in late summer.

“A few of the key components either had technology changes at the last second or delays,” said Cooke, “but we were ready to give things a first try. Unfortunately, the weather did not cooperate with us. When we got to Utah, the flats were flooded. They had hoped it was going to dry up, and thought it could. But it was unprecedented territory to have such a large amount of rain at that time of year. In the end we never made it onto the salt. We spent the week at a local airport and continued to test and tune the vehicle, running up to 100 mph on the runways.”

The team is signed up and preparing to head to the Bonneville Raceway where they will attempt the FIA world record in late August or early September 2014.

After last summer the vehicle was stripped to its bare bones to make a variety of changes and improvements.

This spring it will come together and begin testing. So far, the VBB3 has gone about 100 mph during shakedown runs on test tracks. That’s not impressive in terms of racing numbers, but necessary to work out the bugs in such a complex system.

“Now that everything is designed and built, the big story going forward in 2014 is getting it to come to a common mission and work safely and reliably,” said Cooke.

Will the student-built speed racer reach 400 mph this year? Perhaps the better question is: When the Venturi Buckeye Bullet does enter the Four Club, what’s next?

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comes out of the gate running

By Charles Morris

Few new EVs have been more eagerly awaited than the

BMW i3, which recently made its first US delivery. It’s a great little car that embodies several milestones, both in the technical sphere and in terms of the market, as we detailed in our August 2013 cover story.

The most important factor of all is that BMW appears to consider the i3 an important part of its corporate strategy. This will be no halo model or compliance car, but an actively-marketed vehicle for real people to buy and drive, and its features and price give it the potential to be a huge seller.

The i3 went on sale in Europe in November, and has had a spectacular start. In January, it was the top-selling plug-in in Germany, moving 229 units and handily beating the second-place VW e-Up! In fact, BMW executive Ian Robertson told Automotive News that there’s a six-month waiting list - by February, the company had already taken 11,000 orders, 1,200 of them in the US. BMW is trying to catch up to the demand. Production chief Harald Krueger told Bloomberg in April that the company has raised daily production at its Leipzig factory from 70 to 100 vehicles, and will build about 20,000 units in 2014, almost double the initial sales forecast. Krueger also said that the US will be the i3’s largest market.

Two recent tidbits of good news may boost sales even further. The EPA has rated the i3’s range at 81 miles, and its fuel economy at 124 MPGe combined, which makes it the most efficient EV available. Also, the state of California has decided that the i3 with the optional rangeextending gas engine will be eligible for the same $2,500 purchase rebate as the fully electric version.

Where does the new city car fit into the market? It will be only the second fully electric choice for average buyers (meaning those who can’t afford a Model S, and don’t choose to take a chance on one of the low-volume models, which could go extinct the next time the CARB regulations are revised). It may tempt some wealthier buyers away from the Nissan LEAF - at $42,275, the i3 is far pricier than an entry-level LEAF S ($28,980), but within range of a top-of-the-line LEAF SL ($35,020). The i3’s

closest competitor will probably be the Mercedes-Benz B-Class Electric Drive, which is scheduled to arrive in eight US states this summer with an MSRP of $41,450.

Assuming that long-term sales live up to the early promise, the i3 could be very influential in several ways.

It is already further stimulating EV sales in Europe, where electrification is only now starting to gain traction. It will force other EV-makers to raise their games - Nissan will have to groom the LEAF as a strong lowercost alternative, and Tesla may find, when it launches its mid-market Model E (?) in a few years, that it’s entering a rather crowded segment.

Another way in which the i3 could be a trend-setter: it is a niche vehicle, and BMW isn’t ashamed of the fact (so are pickup trucks and sports cars, and they seem to sell pretty well). If you need to make long road trips, or haul large amounts of cargo, then the i3 isn’t for you.

However, a number of studies have shown that the vast majority of car trips in the US are well within typical EV range. Tempted by a sporty BMW, more and more people may start realizing that going electric could be an option for them.

BMW wisely decided to build the i3 as a native EV, instead of adapting a legacy gas-powered model. This approach is clearly superior, but it requires an automaker to make a colossal upfront investment. We expect BMW’s bold move to be vindicated, and eventually emulated by other automakers. As the i3 becomes a common sight on the roads, more and more drivers are going to realize that they should buy an EV not to save money or polar bears, but because it’s a better vehicle.

Photos courtesy of BMW North America

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