Partnership reaches FEVER pitch
Controlled Power Technologies (CPT) has partnered with Ricardo, Tata Motors European Technical Centre (TMETC) and Provector, to apply its technology to the rear driveline of a B-segment city car.
The consortium has secured a funding award from Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency, which will be contributing £1.8 million of the total £3.4 million investment. The FEVER project will run for two years and will culminate in the development of two through-the-road, 48V electrified rear axle demonstration vehicles.
The investment will help to further introduce advanced mild hybrid functionality to mainstream vehicles at significantly reduced cost to that of high voltage plug-in hybrid or pure electric vehicles (EVs). The innovative electrified rear axle technology will be an important step in enabling OEMs to further improve both regulated and real world fuel economy in modern urban city driving conditions.
The objective of the two-year project is to achieve a CO2 reduction of up to 15%, over the regulatory cycle, through the development of two through-the-road hybrid demonstrator vehicles. Integrating the electric motor within the rear axle will enable features such as low speed electric driving or e-creep, as well as electrically assisted all-wheel drive, which will deliver additional significant savings over a typical representative city drive cycle. The technology will allow a carmaker to reduce the in-use carbon dioxide emissions of such vehicles by approximately 25g/km.
‘This programme will require a high level of project management and engineering cooperation,’ said project director Peter Scanes, senior manager responsible for vehicle OEM mild hybrid programmes at CPT, ‘not least in the unique application of a low voltage high temperature tolerant switched-reluctance machine (SRM), which has to be oil-cooled and packaged as efficiently as possible into a rear axle and suspension module complete with advanced lead-carbon battery.’
CPT is a developer of vehicle driveline electrification based on state-of-the-art SRMs.
