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Rumpelstiltskin famously spun straw into gold, and until recently, the idea of weaving superlight carbon fiber into mainstream cars also seemed a fairy tale.
The reason? Carbon-fiber-reinforced plastic, or CFRP, is expensive. Back in 1992 the cost was insanely high—U.K.-based McLaren Automotive needed 3000 man-hours to hand-layer, mold, and cure the material into the bones of the US $1 million F1, the world’s first street-legal carbon car. And even though McLaren now builds the 75-kilogram carbon chassis of its MP4-12C supercar in just 4 hours and sells the car for $225 000, that’s still too steep for the average buyer.
But now BMW is unveiling a technology that it says can mold a woven sheet of carbon fiber into a completed car part in less than 10 minutes. Those parts will go into the groundbreaking BMW i3, a plug-in hybrid that analysts estimate will cost just $40 000 to $50 000 per car, barely more than the price of a Nissan Leaf EV.
The i3 is a funky, tall-roofed city car with a roughly 160-kilometer range, a 160-km/h top speed, and a carbon-fiber “Life” module that weighs just 120 kg—less than some passengers. The car is set to emerge from a plant in Leipzig, Germany, in late 2013, and production is expected to ramp up to as many as 40 000 units a year.
In 2014 the company will start making the i8 hybrid, a futuristic sports car that starred in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011). In both BMWs, the CFRP passenger module mates to a separate module that integrates the power train, lithium-ion battery, suspension, and aluminum crumple zones.
Building moderately priced cars from CFRP had long been a holy grail for automotive engineers, because a carbon chassis weighs half as much as a steel counterpart and 30 percent less than aluminum. The savings in weight translates into better performance and higher fuel efficiency. Therefore, it’s a material of choice for everything from Formula One racers and America’s Cup yachts to jet fighters, spacecraft, and the Boeing 787.
Cost was the sticking point. “Time and again, everyone said it was impossible,” says Joerg Pohlman, director of BMW’s carbon fiber projects. The technology took hundreds of millions of dollars of research and development to perfect.
The company now intends to begin building more than 1 million carbon-fiber components a year and to eventually base many of its cars on the material.
A linchpin of the plan is in Moses Lake, Wash., where the lure of cheap, clean hydropower sparked a $100 million partnership between BMW and Germany’s SGL, among the world’s top manufacturers of carbon-based products. BMW and SGL bill it as the world’s greenest, most efficient carbon-fiber plant. That’s one reason why the i3’s total life-cycle carbon dioxide emissions will be one-third less than that of the most efficient internal-combustion cars—50 percent less if the i3 is recharged using renewable energy.
Along Moses Lake’s 245-meter production line, bundles of 50 000 silky white polymer acrylic strands—each a tenth as thick as a human hair—are carbonized in furnaces at 1400 °C. Spools of the black fiber head to Wackersdorf, Germany, where they’re woven into sheets. At another German factory, sheets are pressurized, impregnated with liquid thermosetting plastic, and molded—in BMW’s speedier, proprietary take on resin-transfer molding—to form finished components in less than 10 minutes. The trail ends in Leipzig, where components are glue-welded together, forming the bones of a radically new type of car.
Pohlman says other efficiencies will make carbon fiber about as inexpensive to manufacture as aluminum within three to five years. Instead of 350 or 400 metal parts, the i3’s chassis has about 35. The simple construction—a bit like gluing together a model car—eliminates dozens of factory welding robots and manufacturing stations. And unlike steel—even clear-coated steel—carbon fiber never rusts, requires no costly corrosion treatments, and is designed to last for decades with minimal structural fatigue. The plastic underpinnings, experts say, will long outlast the cars and technology that surround them. True, that raises the question of how to recycle the stuff, which is tricky, because recycled fiber isn’t strong enough to reuse in a car chassis.
As ever, government fuel-economy regulations are largely driving this structural revolution, making “lightweighting” one of the biggest automotive trends around the world.
In the United States, President Obama has called for manufacturers of cars and trucks to double their fuel economy by 2025, to a lofty 54.5 miles per gallon (4.3 liters per 100 kilometers). The European Union targets a 40 percent reduction in automotive CO2 emissions by 2018; the target of 130 grams of CO2 per kilometer driven equates to 5.6 L/100 km, or 42 mpg.
The problem is that cars have been porking out for decades, adding power along with air bags and other crash protection. Then there’s such froufrou as 20-inch wheels, navigation systems, and seats that heat, cool, and massage their spoiled occupants.
Both regulators and customers “demand more safety, features, and comfort, but at the same time we are forced to [make them] lightweight,” Pohlman says. “And the response can’t be to take out seat belts and the nav system.”
This article originally appeared in print as "Carbon Car."
Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos
Evan Ackerman is a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum. Since 2007, he has written over 6,000 articles on robotics and technology. He has a degree in Martian geology and is excellent at playing bagpipes.
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.
Another robotic pet on Kickstarter, another bunting of red flags.
Let's see, we've got: "she's so playful and affectionate you'll forget she's a robot." "Everything you can dream of in a best friend and more." "Get ready to fall in love!" And that's literally like the first couple of tiles on the Kickstarter post. Look, the hardware seems fine, and there is a lot of expressiveness going on, I just wish they didn't set you up for an inevitable disappointment when after a couple of weeks it becomes apparent that yes, this is just a robotic toy, and will never be your best friend (or more).
Loona is currently on Kickstarter for about USD $300.
Yeah, but where do I get that awesome shirt?!
Look, if you’re going to crate-train Spot, at least put some blankets and stuffed animals in there or something.
Is there an option in the iRobot app to turn my Roomba into a cake? Because I want cake.
Looks like SoftBank is getting into high-density robotic logistics.
Naomi Wu reviews a Diablo mobile robot (with some really cool customizations of her own), sending it out to run errands in Shenzhen during lockdown.
Roundtable discussion on how teaching automation in schools, colleges, and universities can help shape the workers of tomorrow. ABB Robotics has put together a panel of experts in this field to discuss the challenges and opportunities.
IEEE members get free admission and can help curate exhibits
Joanna Goodrich is the assistant editor of The Institute, covering the work and accomplishments of IEEE members and IEEE and technology-related events. She has a master's degree in health communications from Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, N.J.
Museum ENTER claims to have the largest collection of working Apple computers in Europe.
For more than a decade Museum ENTER, in Solothurn, Switzerland, has been a place where history buffs can explore and learn about the development and growth of computer and consumer electronics in Switzerland and the rest of the world. On display are computers, calculators, floppy disks, phonographs, radios, video game consoles, and related objects.
Thanks to a new four-year partnership between the museum and the IEEE Switzerland Section, IEEE members may visit the facility for free. They also can donate their time to help create exhibits; translate pamphlets, display cards, and other written media; and present science, technology, engineering, and math workshops.
The technology on display includes televisions and radios from the 1950s.ENTER Museum
ENTER started as the private collection of Swiss entrepreneur Felix Kunz, who had been amassing computers and other electronics since the mid-1970s. Kunz and Peter Regenass—a collector of calculators—opened the museum in 2011 near the Solothurn train station.
The museum’s collection focuses on the history of technology made in Switzerland by companies including Bolex, Crypto AG, and Gretag. The technology on display includes early telegraphs, telephones, televisions, and radios.
There are 300 mechanical calculators from Regenass’s collection. One of the mechanical calculators, Curta, looks like a pepper mill and has more than 700 parts.
The museum also has several Volksempfängers, the early radio models used by the Nazis to spread propaganda.
Visitors can check out the collection of working Apple computers, which the museum claims is the largest in Europe.
The IEEE Switzerland Section began its partnership with the museum last year, when the student branch at the IEEE EPFL hosted a presentation there, says IEEE Senior Member Mathieu Coustans, the Switzerland Section’s treasurer.
In May, the section and the museum organized a workshop celebrating 100 years of radio broadcasting in Switzerland. IEEE members presented on the topic in French, Coustans says, and then translated the presentations to English.
Based on the success of both events, he says, the section and the museum began to discuss how else they could collaborate.
The two organizations discovered they have “many of the same goals,” says IEEE Member Violetta Vitacca, chief executive of the museum. They both aim to inspire the next generation of engineers, promote the history of technology, and bring together engineers from academia and industry to collaborate. The section and museum decided to create a long-term partnership to help each other succeed.
In addition to the free visits, IEEE members receive a 10 percent discount on services offered by the museum, including digitizing books and other materials and repairing broken equipment such as radios and vintage record players. Members can donate historical artifacts too. In addition, IEEE groups are welcome to host conferences and section meetings at the facility.
The IEEE Switzerland Section as well as members of student branches and the local IEEE Life Members Affinity Group have agreed to speak at events held at the museum and teach STEM classes there.
“The museum is a space where both professional engineers and young people can network and learn from each other,” Vitacca says. “I think this partnership is a win-win for both IEEE and the museum.”
She says she hopes that “collaborating with IEEE will help Museum ENTER gain an international reputation.”
The perks of the collaboration will become “especially attractive with the opening of the brand-new Museum ENTER building” next year, says IEEE Senior Member Hugo Wyss, chair of the Switzerland Section, who led the partnership effort.
The museum is set to move in May to a larger building in the village of Derendingen. When it reopens there in November, these are some new additions visitors can look forward to:
The museum offers STEM workshops. ENTER Museum
In addition, these eight permanent exhibits will be available, the museum says:
The museum also plans to curate special exhibitions.
“We are going from being simply a museum with an extensive collection to being a center for networking, education, and innovation,” Vitacca says. “That’s why it’s important for the museum to collaborate with IEEE. Our offerings are not only unique in Switzerland but also across Europe. IEEE is a great partner for us to help get the word out about what we do.”
The prevalence and complexity of electronics and software in automotive applications are increasing with every new generation of cars. The critical functions within the system on a chip (SoC) involve hardware and software that perform automotive-related signal communication at high data rates to and from the components off-chip. Every SoC includes general purpose IOs (GPIOs) on its periphery.
For automotive SoCs, GPIO IP is typically developed as Safety Element out of Context and delivered with a set of Assumptions of Use. It is important that the GPIO blocks are treated as a safety related logic. In this role, GPIOs need safety analysis to mitigate any faults occurring in them before the result of fault occurrence causes a system-wide failure.
This white paper describes some of the commonly used safety mechanisms in an automotive-ready GPIO library suite. It will then describe how safety related deliverables are helpful to SoC integrators in their design of safe SoCs.