Australian EV component manufacturing

Electric vehicle components are not only being manufactured in Australia. Research into mobile robots, power systems and battery recycling initiatives are making waves, jump-starting a new global manufacturing industry and its being done here. Paul Hellard discovers its all about the software.

While they do not have an internal combustion engine, Electric Vehicles (EV) require design and analysis involving multi-domain systems integration (battery, fuel cell, power converter, traction,etc). Modelling, testing, and validating is crucial, as early as possiblenot only for the safety of the users post-production, but upstream at the development stage to reduce rework and cost as OEMs formalise software development workflows to accepted standards.

Mathworks

Stephane Marouani is the Country Manager at Mathworks. AMT spoke with him about how EV, automotive and aerospace businesses need to be designing with safety in mind, right from the outset. Mathworks is also working with several Australian businesses making waves in the EV industry developing systems, as you will see below.

Already, today’s car companies are using some kind of system to model the car’s engine systems, electronic and mechatronics, entertainment and navigation systems which interacts. An electric car looks to be far simpler, but from a software standpoint it is of course much more complex.

“The battery management system needs to be modeled, the brakes are more and more built into the hub of the wheel so you don’t need traditional brakes anymore,” said Marouani. MathWorks provides all the software tools for companies to model those complex systems in a virtual environment, and test them and generate the code that will go into the car. “It’s an interesting industry at the moment,” Marouani noted.

“While we don’t have a traditional passenger vehicle manufacturing industry, we definitely do have R&D, we have engineers on the development of vehicles. We have emerging specialised EV companies, we have component design for the mining industry.”

Applied EV

Julian Broadbent is co-founder and CEO at Applied EV, which develops safety rated, autonomous-ready, digital control systems and modular vehicle platforms for commercial applications. Blanc Robot is a driverless, bi-directional, four-wheel-steering vehicle perfect for off-road and on-road commercial applications.

“I’d been thinking how you'd bring such a new technology to market,” said Broadbent, of his company’s vehicles. “If you think in the current logistics world, you've got a truck chassis and then you put a different box on it, for a garbage compaction unit, or a furniture van or a refrigerated van. The Blanc Robot is that ethos. When you take the cabin away, you just have a chassis.”

“We write our own code in house. When you do anything to do with a safety rated machine, you've got to have full control over that. Stephan and the team at MathWorks provide some interesting kit that allows us to write our own code, develop our own algorithms. By using MathWorks and its suite of products, we are much more confident that we now have a structured way of creating safetyrated code.”

“We build the software in the electronics that runs on any vehicle so that it can be autonomous,” said Broadbent. “This is an interesting space for us now. The Blanc robot is that plus the mechanical aspects. We have four autonomous partners now and we're growing. We're a pathway for autonomous tech companies to get their product and of course our product to become a solution for the market.”

First unveiled in 2019 in Las Vegas, at the Consumer Electronics Show, this Australian made electric autonomous vehicle was received extremely well, even as a Gen-Three prototype. Applied EV got their start by commercialising the technology. Broadbent tells me Applied EV generates the majority of their capital through equity investment. They provide engineering services and the vehicles to commercial customers at the same time as improving, modifying and the technology for specific industrial applications.

Applied EV is creating the future of transport with driverless, efficient transport solutions with Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL) architected applications for the automotive and industrial sectors. Their factory in suburban Bayswater is full of vehicle parts, prototypes and rooms full of intense researchers. Broadbent is on the cusp of moving to a purpose-built new property across in Mulgrave, large enough to include an internal test-track for these fullsize Blanc vehicles, now in development for major clients.

“Automation, robotics, software, and electronics could be a way for Australia to become an attractive focus,” added Broadbent. “Other manufacturing centres use low-cost labor and export to the world. Australia has a huge amount of land, and we almost have free energy. And if we invested in the local technology we would have a clear advantage.”

Lumen Freedom

Lumen Freedom is a Melbourne-based manufacturer that has developed a Wireless Electric Vehicle Charging (WEVC) system with an impressive ≥92% efficiency in power transmission. The technology is both efficient and safe, not only meeting but exceeding the highest standards for performance. The system adopts the use of patented Double D coil technology which achieves a higher flux density concentration than single coil systems. The Australian Lumen Group also has offices and warehouses all over the world, with customers ranging from Ford, GM, Mazda, Toyota to Lexus, Chevrolet, Stellantis and KIA.

WEVC is the function of wirelessly charging a vehicle using resonant inductive magnetic coupling between a transmitting ground pad and receiving pad fitted to the vehicle. This concept is a larger version of charging your phone, wirelessly.

“Just in the last month Lumen Freedom has released a semidynamic trial concept with Nottingham City Council, Coventry University, Shell, Cenex, Sprint Power and Transport for London, with funding from Innovate UK”, Rod Wilson, the General Manager of Lumen Freedom said. ‘We have two different types of taxis, the LEVC and the Nissan Dynamo, that are using the WEVC system. We're also the first to do an OEM contract with McLaren. We're the first company to develop a single box 11-kilowatt system.”

Lumen Freedom is also trialling a dynamic system for installation under the asphalt of a single designated lane on a future highway. The Lumen Freedom system has a monitor which would be much like a television switched off overnight from the remote. It would be sitting dormant sensing for a signal from an approaching car to engage charge from the pad.

“In the taxi setup, we do have a very low power transmission on at all times, purely to aid in the detection and alignment of the vehicles,” explains Radek, the software manager of Lumen Freedom. “That's a good analogy in that it is using a very small amount of power transfer and WiFi to do the identification, detection and the hand shaking. It's a semi-dynamic approach where you have the vehicles transitioning from one pad to the other in close proximity, and then when it does the hand-shaking and the ground assembly connects to the vehicle, it will request as much power as it needs, and the ground assembly will ramp itself up to speed. But otherwise, the pad is pretty much off in a dormant state.

“Heavy haulage is not on our immediate roadmap,” explains Rod Wilson. “We've got three steps. We've got Domestic, at 11kW home use, Shopping centres, Car Parks then move to semiDynamic, for Taxi Ranks and eventually we see Dynamic charging, installed in freeway lanes for charging Motor Vehicles and heavy haulage electric truck fleets at speeds more than 100km per hour.

“These Dynamic tracks are already under development in Europe and the USA. Using these lanes will immediately eliminate range anxiety on trips like between Melbourne and Sydney,” says Wilson. “There will be a stretch of 50-100 kilometres available for the motorist to use for Dynamic on the move charging. You'll just go into the green zone and keep your hundred Ks an hour and you'll charge as you drive seamlessly. That's not just functional. That is a reality. It's already been proven out and being installed overseas.”

In the initial research with governments and councils, Lumen found there is preference for adopting the WEVC concept. Wilson adds they found that, “councils want to move away from ‘plugin’ because of the connection problems, high maintenance costs, visual pollution impacting on the appeal of the street scape and a high incidence of theft of charging cables. “This is at an all-time high in the USA because the copper is so valuable, the plug in cables are being cut and sold for scrap,” Wilson said.

Any vehicle fitted with the charging pad would only need to drive over the WEVC base pad and be guided in by the display, an intelligent alignment system guides the driver with simple visual cues. Lumen has been busy developing a system with a high tolerance to misalignment.

This is a system for either a plug-in hybrid with a small battery, or a fully electric vehicle. The automated scalable system can charge at strengths of 3.7KW, to 11KW and up to 22KW in the future. The lower charge can be perfect for slow overnight charging.

IM Group

Innovative Mechatronics Group (IM Group) brings all aspects of vehicle propulsion into the present day, by adapting their model to become the remanufacturing centre for all hybrid and EV batteries. Manufacturing and circuitry technology has been continuously advancing, leading to even more energy storage solutions emerging onto the market, for a lot more than just for mobile phones and laptops.

There are now a wave of electric vehicles rolling across the market and that means the supply of ‘spent batteries’ will flood the market. These units contain lithium, nickel, cobalt and other minerals and it is critical that a sustainable circular model or remanufacturing capture this precious resource.

Working on this holistic move to the sustainable circular economy, auto-component makers and suppliers of batteries to all kinds of industries can map out their journey towards this important approach. A shortage of trained employees across manufacturing industries is also becoming apparent as more electronic components replace mechanical manufacturing.

At the recent launch of the brand “INFINITEV” from IM Group, General Manager Dickson Leow spoke about the second life applications of vehicle traction batteries and the recovery of the lithium, cobalt, manganese and nickel. “This would allow us to spread the greenhoouse gas emissions created during the battery’s production over a greater number of years or kilometres,” he said. “We also defer the creation of a new batteries and all it’s required minerals and environmental footprint by reusing, repurposing and recycling the unit.” The emissions ejected during extracting of raw materials, vehicle manufacturing, shipping and recycling need to be taken into consideration as well – a holistic modeling approach.

lumenfreedom.com appliedev.com im-group.com.au au.mathworks.com