NOT JUST ANOTHER ELECTRIC CAR
Uniti engineers are nothing if not passionate. Their constantly updated YouTube videos, all in the name of transparency, exude a passion usually reserved for CrossFit enthusiasts.
Uniti is a Swedish start-up crammed with tech-savvy engineers who have decided to enter the hyper-competitive world of electric cars. Partners are Siemens, robotics firm KUKA energy group E.ON. Uniti brings to the table a near-evangelical fervour that is reminiscent of Apple in the early days. Listening to Lewis Horne, Uniti’s Australian-born ceo, you can hear echoes of a young Elon Musk. His tone is informal, impassioned and driven – an entrepreneur’s tone, the sound of someone on a mission.
Steering unit in the Uniti car.
Uniti’s two-seater electric car is defined by its human-centric design and its focus on the battery, a removable auxiliary system, which enables flexible charging. The vehicle is a light-weight (450 kilograms) and can reach speeds of up to 130 km/h. It has a futuristic heads-up display to allow for more focus on the road, and the steering unit could be from something out of Star Wars. This detail extends to its skf double row deep grove ball bearing for the door-hinge assembly.
Uniti engineers like to see themselves as game changers, bringing a breath of fresh air to an old market. If they manage to maintain the drive they have today, who knows where the road may take them?
THE ELECTRIC REVOLUTION
From Tesla to Uber and pretty much every automotive manufacturer in between, it seems the smart money is on electric vehicles (EV’s). This is also good news for Gränges, according to Colin Xu, President for Gränges Asia.
As sustainable transport is increasingly in the spotlight, statements from vehicles manufactures ranging from Volvo to Scania, Toyota to BMW are all coming into line with government, and non-government thinking— the future must be electric. Battery prices are dropping by about 20 percent a year, and automakers have been spending billions to electrify their fleets. The reputed business and financial services company, Bloomberg, reports (2017) that Volkswagen AG is targeting 25 percent of its sales to be electric by 2025 and Toyota Motor Corporation plans to phase out fossil fuels altogether by 2050.
Says Colin Xu, President Asia Gränges, “Right now, electric vehicles (EV’s) are basically the hottest topic in China, and China is definitely the biggest producer of EV’s in the world today.”
This is significant, given that China is Gränges most important market, due to both market size and growth potential.
Around 50 percent of Gränges’ present sales are to customers in the automotive industry. Over time, by growing with the Chinese automotive market, Gränges has established a strong position in Asia. The internal combustion engine relies on a number of heat exchangers for cooling the engine, transmission mechanisms and engine oil, air conditioning systems, and in some cases, batteries. More modern vehicles typically contain up to ten different heat exchangers. As a result, and as a world leader and global supplier of heat exchanger materials Gränges plays a vital role in modern car production.
“The question – as we move towards EV – is whether the type of heat exchanger will be changed in the electric vehicles, that will, of course, impact the demand of material,” says Xu.
Essentially the material will need to be light, thinner, stronger and with better corrosion performance. Gränges aluminium solutions do fit these requirements. However, nothing is absolutely certain about exactly how tomorrow’s car or mobility solution will look.
Aside from fully battery driven EV’s is the question of ‘the bridging technology’ such as plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV’s). PHEV’s require a dual system, both an internal combustion engine and a small battery. As Xu explains, “you may need a dual thermal management system to deal with the two systems, so in the short term if the PHEV’s have a boom in growth then, of course, the demand for heat exchanger material will also boom.”
Although the future looks encouraging, Xu is cautious, “There are a lot of uncertainties and the technology is still rather vague so we have to be ready for any eventuality.”
“On the other hand, if we can follow up on the technology side, I think things will go well. I believe the consumption of aluminium will be even more in the future than with the combustion engine that exists today.”
FACTS
The rise of electric cars
· In July 2017, the production and sales of new energy vehicles in China reached 59 thousand units and 56 thousand units respectively, increasing 52.6% and 55.2% year on year.
1. By 2030, electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids will become fully cost-competitive with internal combustion engine cars in Europe, where fuel taxes are estimated to be high and vehicle attributes (namely power) more favourable to electrification than in other regions.
2. Several countries have banned sales of petrol and diesel cars by 2040, including France and Britain.
3. Volvo recently announced that all the company’s cars to be electric or hybrid from 2019.
Sources: 2015 China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, Global EV Outlook 2017, The International Energy Agency (IEA), The Guardian
CONTINUING THE COMMUNICATION REVOLUTION
Remember the time before smartphones and ‘mobile solutions’, before all the talk of autonomous systems and the Internet of Things? Remember when there was no 2, 3 or 4G? Remember wires, everywhere.
"I remember when, perhaps twenty years ago, what we were doing here was seen as interesting but too expensive to develop." Reflects Mikael Skoglund, Head of the Department of Information Science and engineering and vice dean of the school of Electrical Engineering at KTH.
For the past twenty years both he and his colleague, Professor of Signal Processing and program director for the MSc program in Wireless Systems, Mats Bengtsson have been performing both theoretical as well as experimental research, using numerous tools from information, communication, and coding theory to signal processing, machine learning and statistical physics to further develop wireless networks.
Skoglund and Bengtsson along with colleagues and students have worked to develop a technology we have come to take for granted, a technology which becomes more reliable, trusted, able, efficient and capable with each new ‘generation’. By the time we arrived at ‘3G’ enabled mobile devices they had capabilities that made it possible for us to access everything, almost anywhere. The wireless networking capability gave birth to the “smartphone”. It was easy to play games, send videos and images. Microblogging and sharing numerous selfies had become part of our everyday lives. This was all made possible from rapid, constant data transfer.
The next leap in wireless technology, 4G, became known as ‘mobile broadband anywhere and everywhere’ and it changed the atomic unit of the web from images to videos. Skoglund and Bengtsson, as well as colleagues and students, were involved from the start and between 2000 and 2010 they worked on 4G development. Their work was given a boost when in 2004 the European Commission began the project Wireless World Initiative New Radio (WINNER) whose aim it was to define the fourth generation radio standard. WINNER united 4G industry and researchers from Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden and the UK. By 2010 4G was a reality and the European Commission decided to invest 18 million Euros in the further development of the technology. Overall, the years 2007-2013 saw the EU invest more than €700 million into research on future networks, half of which was allocated to wireless technologies contributing to the development of 4G and beyond 4G networks.
The work on 4G has been a resounding success. Aside from download and streaming speeds, it has been a success from a societal point of view. It has led to a decrease in the digital divide between urban and rural communities. Worldwide standardisation has meant the use of a single technology from across the world without changes between Europe the United States and Japan- areas which previously all operated on separate systems. The internet on our phones is now taken for granted, and mobile internet usage, in 2016, surpassed desktop usage for the first time. 80 percent of time spent on social media is
spent on mobile devices and social media itself has been supercharged from Snapchat stories to the 8bn video views on Facebook per day.
When asked about their role in the development of this disruptive and enabling technology Skoglund explains that it was, “Through our research, networking and working on the huge European projects that we contributed.”
Looking to the future we can glimpse just how the work done by Bengtsson, Skoglund and the EE School continues to have an impact. Both 4G and now 5G have been influenced not only by the work of Skoglund and Bengtsson but also by their former Phd students, now working with major telecommunication companies such as Ericsson and Huawei. Already in the early 2010’s Skoglund and Bengtsson were involved in the development of the new 5G technology. WINNER was soon followed by another European project, the Mobile and wireless communications Enablers for Twenty-twenty (2020) Information Society (METIS). METIS, a consortium of 29 partners focusing on developing a concept for 5G was coordinated by Ericsson whereas WINNER was led by Siemens. This time the technical objective was to develop a concept for the future mobile and wireless communications system that would support the connected information society.
“5G will be different again,” Says Skoglund. “If you browse the internet over the phone a two-second delay can be okay, but if you wish to control a robot over wireless or an autonomous car, the requirements on real-time and reliable communication are much tougher. 4G can’t deliver that.”
We should be in no doubt that 5G technology will be transformative. It will affect most industries, and will supercharge virtual and artificial reality. The Department of Information Science and Engineering has made its mark on the way in which we live our lives today and will continue to have an influence on how we will live them tomorrow.
This article was originally published in KTH a piece of history
https://www.antonywrites.com/home/2017/12/29/continuing-the-communication-revolution
EDUCATION: ENGINEERING THE PERFECT BALANCE
Engineers have been trained at KTH Royal Institute of Technology for over 100 years. Teaching practice has always evolved and adapted both with the college and society at large. Today, striking a balance between theory and practical experience is at the centre of the most recent education reforms.
The balance ensures that the university delivers professionals with relevant practical experience, in addition to being schooled in the fundamental scientific rigour that must underpin that practice. However, a balance between science and practice has not always been to the aim of the university.
Post-world war one KTH was a very different institution to today’s university. If you were to visit you would have found a male-dominated training college, much more of a ‘workshop’ with an apprenticeship style. Similar to today’s facility it was a proud institution in which students could expect the best training in the latest methods when studying in fields such as materials science. But it was certainly, without question, more traditionally focused. Training was rooted in the apprenticeship system for tradesmen. Water engineers could for instance make use of the special V-shaped building (known as the trouser legs) where the basement of one ‛leg’ had large water channels that could be used for various experiments. It was very much a ‘hands-on’ school.
However, after time it had become clear that the school was going to need to move towards more theory. And so in 1867 “scientific training” was entered into the university’s statutes. Theory began to occupy more space in the curriculum.
A leap forward and we find ourselves in the 1990s, and now the tables have very much turned. By this time there were very few internships being offered by industry and the practical requirement for a degree was removed altogether. At KTH many professors themselves had little or no practical experience and theoretical work and research became all dominant.
“In engineering education in the 1990s there was nothing about conceiving, there was nothing about implementing or operating, it was all design or calculations.” Says Joakim Lilliesköld, Associate Professor in Industrial Systems Engineering, and the man responsible for education at the School of Electrical Engineering. Critics were also looking to engineering colleges around the world and feeling that the focus on the profession was being left behind. In the US, Boeing the multinational corporation and engineering giant, had made the observation that they were unhappy with the graduates that they were getting. As Lilliesköld describes it “they, as well as many other companies, were not really happy with the engineers that came out of the system, they wanted to see a change in their education so that they would get more practice into it and they took a systems approach to how to re-train them.” It was out of this that the ‘CDIO’ method was born in the early 2000s. The method focuses on
four key areas that the students need to work with in order to become rounded engineers; Conception, Design, Implementation, and Operation.
“CDIO was a project funded by Wallenberg where they provided money to three Swedish university’s; Chalmers, Linkoping and KTH, and M.I.T in the US – the goal was to educate engineers that can engineer,” says Lilliesköld.
CDIO said that engineering programmes needed to have all four fundamental puzzle pieces. Additionally, it was realised that for the ‘hands-on’ aspect, project courses would also need to be added to the curriculum. Lilliesköld explains how the model was added to and adjusted, “another dimension was realised – that you had to have a progression of skills. So a long set of engineering skills was developed, you needed to be able to work in a team, to do a project plan, to be able to communicate. All of the skills of the engineer were examined.” A key feature of CDIO was the way in which it was ‘baked in’, the skills were not taught separately — there was not a project management course or a technical writing course — they were integrated into the actual technical courses. CDIO has continued to develop and the curriculum at KTH’s School of Electrical Engineering has adapted and evolved.
At KTH this most recent evolution of education started in 1999 when the first year project course began. According to Lilliesköld it created a lot of discussions as to whether or not you could present an application before all relevant theories were known. Another issue was the product focus of CDIO, in early 2000 it was difficult for many at the department to talk about products for Electrical Engineering. Then something changed. Project courses were developed in many of the master programs. In 2007, the bachelor thesis was added to the curricula as a result of the Bologna reform. 10 years later, the next step was taken to introduce a more challenging project course in the 2nd year at the bachelor level. Then, in 2013 the curriculum was rebuilt. The result was a program to create world-class electrical engineers. A course with both a strong theoretical base and one project each year to tie the theoretical courses together. Additionally, there is a course called Global Impact of Electrical Engineering that looks at future challenges and introduces students to a mentor from the faculty. As Lilliesköld says, “Altogether, students now leave with a good mix of skills, ready for the demands of 21st-century industry.