The automotive manufacturing landscape is changing – it’s in a period of flux.
Manufacturers are transitioning from creating internal combustion engines (ICE), to hybrid
technologies, to full battery electric vehicles (EV). What this means is that there is high
amounts of competition and the new designs are just the start – you have to be able
to productionise and mass produce these efficiently. So, the winners are those with a good design
that can put that design into a process which manufactures it efficiently and takes advantage
of new technologies to drive those efficiencies. So, automotive manufacturers who are on the
journey from an internal combustion engine to a hybrid to a full electric vehicle have
several challenges. I think one of the most obvious is product lifecycles are shortening.
Whereas an internal combustion engine might have lasted 5 or 8 years before it was replaced,
more modern designs have a much shorter life span and what that means to a production environment
is that to be efficient, it has to be flexible. You can’t simply throw away all of the tooling
and equipment and the knowledge and then bring in some new equipment and be efficient. So
designing your new production processes with future-proof technologies in mind, being able
to reprogram existing equipment and re-use it is going to become very important.
Renishaw has been supporting the automotive industry for decades now. A great example
of where we would be able to help manufacturers with these new types of technology would be
in interim and final inspection. So typically these checks use coordinate measurement machines
to carry these measurements out, and they’re large capital pieces of equipment. Much like
people’s mobile phones have now evolved into a multi-functional device…the CMM is
going down a similar route. Maybe not quite to the same level, but along the same lines
where not only would you half inspection cycle times by using 5-axis inspection but you would
then put additional measurements into the same automated program process – a good
example is surface finish inspection. So you’re taking what used to be two processes and collapsing
them down into one single automated process and efficiency changes are then coming from
that. It’s no longer good enough to capture rogue
components at the end of the production line. By the time they get there they are expensive,
with EV components and assemblies they’re very expensive and it could just be one single
component that renders the whole assembly scrap. So what we’re looking towards is
a flexible process, called an Equator gauge, which we’d put in as an interim check and
that interim check would not only look at the size of the component and give feedback
on that but it would alter the upstream process and feedback the upstream process to give
you a much smarter controlled process and therefore a better yield from that process.
Batteries have often been talked about as the defining component in a battery electric
vehicle – they’re certainly one of the largest components, they’re at the moment
the dominant expense in a battery electric vehicle…so technologies that can reduce
that or get efficiencies from the battery are very important and there is a lot of research
money going into that. Our raman spectroscopy looks at battery chemistry, and not just battery
chemistry in a static mode but when the battery is being charged in real-time or discharged
in real-time and the effects on the chemistry and the efficiency and the life of the battery.
So if what we’ve talked about today has been interesting to you and you want to keep
up to date with the latest innovations from Renishaw in the automotive industry, then
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