Experts gathered at the 9th
CTI Symposium to discuss the
challenges of reducing noise,
improving energy efficiency
and meeting the changing demands
of the marketplace
Fuel efficiency is the hottest button
among hot-button topics being discussed
by automobile manufacturers
and their suppliers today. Virtually every
component in an automobile has
been re-engineered over the last decade
to reduce vehicle weight, decrease energy
consumption and recover energy
otherwise lost. Nowhere is that more
true than among those involved with
designing and developing automobile
transmissions, as evidenced by the
presentations, discussions and exhibits
at the 9th International CTI Symposium,
held in May in Novi, MI.
More than 500 engineers and other
industry professionals gathered at the 9th
CTI Symposium held in May in Novi, MI.
Nearly every presenter at the symposium
spoke about government regulations
that require auto manufacturers
to reduce the fuel consumption of their
fleets by targeted deadlines. In the
USA, the automakers have a deadline
of 2025 to meet the Corporate Average
Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards. Similar
regulations are in place throughout
the world.
Naturally, the transmission is a key
component in achieving those standards,
and the amount of reengineering
that’s already taken place and that
continues to take place has made the
design and development of automobile
transmissions far more complex
than it used to be.
It used to be that engineers had to
choose between manual and automatic,
between three speeds or four. Today
the discussion begins at six speeds
and goes up from there. The practical
limit seems to be in the 10-12 range,
because every additional gear adds
complexity to the device — think about
the clutches and controls involved.
Add in today’s choices of dual-clutch
transmissions, CVTs and electric motors
— nearly everyone in the industry
is talking about or beginning to implement
some form of electrification of
their transmissions — and you quickly
begin to understand how much this industry
has changed in recent years.
Add to that the much more rapid development
cycles required by today’s
market for new transmission models.
The lifetime of a manufacturing line for
transmissions is no longer the 20 years
it used to be. Today, it’s more like five
or six years.
All of this just explains how important
conferences like the CTI Symposium
are, and why the CTI Symposium
continues to grow. The 2015
USA conference included more than
500 participants, more than 60 technical
presentations, and 39 exhibitors.
This compares with 400 participants,
47 presentations and 29 exhibitors at
last year’s conference. CTI holds three
conferences each year: one in the USA,
one in Asia and one in Germany. The
upcoming 2015 conferences will take
place in Shanghai (Sept. 16-18) and
Berlin (Dec. 7-10), with Berlin being by
far the largest of the three (last year’s
Berlin conference had more than 1,300
participants)..
Whether or not you are directly involved
in the auto industry, it pays to
take note of what’s going on there, because
inevitably, much of the technology
developed there finds its way into
other industries.
The conference included two days
of plenary speeches and technical presentations.
Plenary speeches included:
Welcome address and opening
comments, by Ernie J. DeVincent,
vice president, product
development for Getrag and
chairman of the conference.
“The Getrag Approach to Enabling
Global Fuel Economy Compliance,”
by John McDonald, chief operating
officer for Getrag global operations.
“GM’s Perspective on the Evolution
of the Automotive Transmission
2020 and Beyond,” by Mike Harpster,
director of GM’s Propulsion Systems
Research Lab.
“Enablers for the Next Generation of
Fuel Economy Regulations,” by Don
Hillebrand, director of the Center
for Transportation Research at
Argonne National Laboratory.
“Efficient Future Mobility – the Road
to CAFE 2025,” by Philip George,
director of advanced development
for Schaeffler North America.
“Can We Make That?” by Charles
Gray, director of transmission &
driveline engineering for Ford
Motor Co.
“Contribution to World Market by
CVT Technologies,” by Hiroyuki Kai,
director general of JATCO Mexico.
“Future Proofing Our Waste and
Delivery Transit Infrastructure,” by
Ian Wright, CEO of Wrightspeed Inc.
“Roadmap to Autonomous Driving,”
by Ali Maleki, vice president
of business
development for
Ricardo Inc.
In addition, technical presentations
were given over the two days in the following
topic areas
Transmission Concepts
Drive Cycles
Hybrid Electric Vehicles
Diagnosis and Functional Safety
All-Wheel Drive
Noise, Vibration and Harshness
Manufacturing/Transmission
Components
Gear and Transmission
Expertise on Two Continents
Alex Tylee-Birdsall (right), technical director of Drive
System Design, explains the company's prototype
transmission project to a visitor at the CTI Symposium.
Drive System Design is a company
specializing in the design and development
of transmission, driveline and
gear drives, says technical director
Alex Tylee-Birdsall.
“If you look outside of automotive,
we also work in off-highway, industrial
transmissions — really gear drives and
anything that transmits power.”
Drive System Design was founded
in 2007 with a staff of two. Over the
years, it has grown to more than 60 people, and
in 2014, the company opened a dedicated
office in Farmington Hills, MI, to
serve the North American market.
“We’ve gained a reputation for really
good engineering, being right on
the cutting edge of what people are
doing, and analytically solving problems
very quickly — like NVH issues,”
Tylee-Birdsall says. “We’ve tried to get
the best engineers we possibly can in
both markets. I would argue that both
in the U.K. and over here we’ve built up
the best teams of those people. I think
that’s one of the reasons why people
come to us.”
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Drive System Design works on a
wide variety of projects, Tylee-Birdsall
says. “It can be anything from a really small project — just design a gear — up
to a full three-year transmission design
and development program, all the way
up to production.
“One of the smallest transmissions
we ever worked on was for a mechanical
hand. The transmission measured
28 mm in diameter by 10 mm in length.
It was a two-speed, torque-sensing
transmission. Effectively the way that
worked is that if you go to grip something,
it moves very quickly. Once it
senses resistance and pressure, then it
moves much more slowly to grip.”
Mike Harpster
The company has also done significant
work in off-highway markets.
“That’s a developing sort of marketplace,”
Tylee-Birdsall says. “People
want to have better shift quality, and
they want to be comfortable in their
air-conditioned cabs, whereas back
in the day they were quite happy with
the sun beating down on them. We’re
seeing a lot of opportunity there in developing
the control systems to make
shifting better.”
“We also have major projects in oil
and gas,” Tylee-Birdsall says. “There
are quite a lot of innovative people out
there looking at ways of extracting oil,
and all of that stuff needs power transmission.
It needs reliable gearboxes. If
you take fracking, for example, there’s
a lot of use of conventional transmissions
in that industry. They’re having
to run at quite high power for a long
time, and they’re not really designed
for that. So there are a lot of people
looking at proper transmissions designed
just for that.”
Philip George
And optimizing transmissions and
the related systems is what Drive System
Design specializes in. The company
uses a combination of software and
engineering expertise to provide solutions
to customer problems.
“We’re often using the ability of
MASTA to develop transmission housings
while still on the drawing board,”
says Shaun Mepham, president of
Drive System Design, Inc., the USA branch of the company. “That allows us
to engineer the housing structure such
that it is quieter than what we used to
do by engineering it from scratch, not
doing any analysis and waiting for
it to be measured on the test rig. We
are computing all of the losses in all
of the components, then constructing
the loss of a gearbox and comparing it
against three, four, five other variants,
to make sure that the one that comes
off the drawing board is the solution
with the lowest loss.”
Tylee-Birdsall adds that the company’s
engineers aren’t restricted to any
one piece of software or tool set. They
rely heavily on a wide variety of software,
including very specific packages
such as Klingelnberg’s KIMOS and
Gleason’s CAGE software. They also
work in a wide variety of CAD and FEA
systems so that they can communicate
designs with customers no matter
what platform they use
Of course, the company’s display at
the CTI Symposium focuses specifically
on automotive. One of the centerpieces
of their display was a prototype
transmission that the company
designed, developed and produced as
a demonstration of their capabilities.
Charles Gray
“We’re a consultancy, so that
means that a lot of what we do, we
can’t talk about,” Tylee-Birdsall says.
“We’ve signed NDAs, that sort of
thing. So one of the things we decided
to do about four years ago
was to do our own research project.”
In this case, the project involved a new
way of adding electric motors to the
driveline. “We looked at what everybody
was doing,” Tylee-Birdsall says.
“What we saw was, everyone was doing
single-speed gearboxes and using very
energy-hungry high-speed motors.
And we thought, ‘We’re transmission
engineers. We can do better than that.’”
So Drive System Design developed
an architecture that includes 48V electric
motors that can be easily fitted into
the drivetrain and deliver extra power
where needed — without the complexity,
expense and need for recharging
stations required by higher voltage
systems. They also reduced the energy
consumption of the transmission by
going multi-speed.
Solvay Specialty Polymers
demonstrated the advantages
of engineered plastics for use
in automotive applications at
the 9th CTI Symposium.
“It’s not necessarily a product that
we’re selling to market,” Tylee-Birdsall
says, “but it gives a showcase that says, look, we can do a full
transmission design
in a vehicle. We can
do the control system,
the hydraulics.
It gives a good showcase
of everything we
can do. It’s got all of
our gear design technology
in it as well.
We’ve done an awful lot of work in lownoise
gear design. In fact, a lot of the
major electric vehicle manufacturers
have our gear designs in them.”
Tylee-Birdsall emphasizes that the
company is far more than just a design
consultancy.
Hiroyuki Kai
“Along with the ability to design, do
detailed analysis and write control systems,
we also have a full facility in the
back that allows us to do full prototype
assembly. We have vehicle ramps that
allow us to do vehicle build and installation.
We have six test cells, including
spin rigs, lubrication tilt rig, a fully
loaded 310 kW loaded rig. And we have
a massive four-square rig, and our own
hydraulics clean room.”
For more information:
Drive System Design
38855 Hills Tech Drive, Suite 500
Farmington Hills, MI 48331
(248) 893-6210
www.drivesystemdesign.com
Plastic Components Simplify
Design, Save Space and Weight
At the Solvay Specialty Polymers
booth, the emphasis was on replacing
traditional metal components and systems
with plastics.
“One of the main applications we’re
focused on is needle bearing replacement,”
says Brian Baleno, global automotive
manager for specialty polymers.
“A typical needle bearing is
quite complex. With a polymeric bearing,
there are several benefits. One is
weight savings. But the biggest benefit
is space savings.”
In a typical automotive
needle bearing application,
you can get an average
of 2 mm space savings.
“That allows you to downsize
the transmission casing
or housing,” Baleno says.
“That means weight savings,
which translates into less
energy consumption.”
The technology also can
be used outside of automotive,
in industrial applications,
Baleno says.
“Anywhere you want to realize weight
savings and also improve efficiency.
The nice thing about a polymeric
thrust bearing is that you can design in
an oil groove, so you can get oil to flow
through and provide continuous lubrication
as well.”
“Another application that we do a lot
of work on is seal rings,” Baleno says,
adding that today’s highly engineered
thermoplastic materials are better able
to withstand the high temperatures
and pressures required by many automotive
applications.
