Professional Engineering
When a major automotive supplier decided to slim down, a tiny start-up firm was first to pick up its technological gems. Ben Hargreaves reports.
When large businesses decide to slim down, there’s no guarantee that their assets, divisions or technologies will find a home. Tier one automotive supplier Visteon, which made headlines last November when it sold its largest UK manufacturing facility in Swansea to Canada’s Linamar Corporation, has been shedding weight in other areas too as part of a restructuring programme that is expected to save $400 million a year.
In the quest to redefine and streamline the business, the advanced powertrain technologies and programmes developed by Visteon but no longer deemed essential to the business might have been expected to disappear into oblivion. But a start-up automotive technology firm believes it has snaffled up some of the supply giant’s most viable offerings, and is hoping to make an impact with carmakers athome and further afield.
Controlled Power Technologies (CPT), a company formed just one year ago, announced earlier this month it had completed the acquisition of three separate technologies developed by Visteon that it believes will help to play a role as carmakers attempt to reduce CO2 emissions. Not only has CPT bought up significant amounts of Visteon intellectual property and technology, its senior management team is comprised of former Visteon executives and engineers. One of them, Guy Morris, was tasked with the disposal of those selfsame technologies.
That was an “awkward position” for Morris to find himself in, notes Nick Pascoe, chief executive, who explains that the establishment of CPT was a management buy-in funded by venture capital. He hopes it will allow commercialisation of certain automotive technologies that several former senior Visteon staff seem to be rather attached to. Now the funding and technology have been secured, CPT is optimistic that the devices it has acquired are close to commercialisation with automotive OEMs.
Pascoe is understandably reluctant to comment on the reasons underlying Visteon’s decision to sell the technologies – for an electronically controlled supercharger, stop-start system and exhaust energy recovery system – to the nascent CPT, other than saying that the supplier had made a “strategic decision” to consider disposal of its advanced powertrain products. He does say, however, that the decision to sell 18 months ago “preceded the frenzy in the market for CO2 reduction technologies”.
The three products all rely on motor technology from Harrogate’s Switched Reluctance Motors, which has signed collaboration and licensing agreements with CPT. Pascoe describes the products as a “family”.
“They are all built on switched reluctance motor technology, which offers very good power density and great flexibility,” he explains.
Closest to finding its way into production cars is the supercharger, which is being considered by two OEMs already, and is the latest iteration of a design known as VTES (variable torque enhancement system) developed by Visteon since 2001. “It targets the market trend towards engine downsizing,” says Pascoe. “It’s very much targeted at maintaining or improving driveability, which is what really allows you to downsize the engine.”
A carmaker, for example, might want to move from a 1.6 litre engine to a 1.2 litre version, reducing CO2 emissions through a smaller powertrain, but maintaining the driving performance of the 1.6. It’s here that the electrically controlled supercharger can play a part, says Pascoe.
Engineers at Visteon realised that the switched reluctance motor technology employed by VTES could potentially be used for a stopstart system, leading to the development of one of the company’s other products.
“Out of the initial development of the VTES unit came the question, ‘why can’t one of these motor units be used in an integrated startergenerator, or stop-start device?’”
Pascoe says. “Engineers started work about five years ago on resizing the motor to suit the sorts of power requirements for stopstart.”
In both the stop-start application and the supercharger the speed of response of the motor is critical, getting up to about 70,000rpm in a third of a second in the case of VTES. What Pascoe calls a “standard dilemma” for a development engineer – the need for a small supercharger to get up to speed quickly and a larger unit for top-end power – can be overcome by careful deployment of the smaller in front of the larger. “That way we get the best of both worlds – the instant responsiveness and the efficiencies of the larger turbocharger,” says Pascoe.
The start-stop system is designed to fit in the footprint of a standard alternator, which it is expected to replace, along with the starter motor, giving it a good “cost-benefit ratio”. It is also designed to work within a 12-volt electrical architecture.
“You’re very limited as to how many kilowatts you can get out of that 12V configuration so the motor has to be very efficient and it has to be able to get good power density out of a very small unit,” Pascoe says.
Along with bringing the technology it has purchased to market, CPT must try to reconstruct engineering teams to develop and sell the systems. The company has a 1,500 square metre facility in Basildon – also acquired from Visteon – and the next year is likely to be busy spent filling it. “By the end of the year we hope to have 25-30 specialised engineers on board,” Pascoe concludes.