E-Mobility Engineering 019 | In conversation: Stephen Lambert l WAE EVR l Battery case materials focus l Quality control insight l Clipper Automotive Clipper Cab digest l Optimising battery chemistries insight l Powertrain testing focus

48 May/June 2023 | E-Mobility Engineering driven by the automotive industry, to improve design to make inspection better while improving inspection to minimise design constraints.” Perera i Vernetta argues, “QC standards and requirements are constantly evolving as technology advances and new regulations are introduced, and this creates a knowledge gap for suppliers whomay not be aware of the latest QC requirements. Also, some suppliersmight prioritise cost reduction and time to market over quality control. “That can result in components or subsystems that have not been thoroughly tested or inspected before being delivered to the EV manufacturer, which can increase costs enormously. To face these challenges, OEMs must work with their suppliers to ensure that quality control requirements are clearly communicated and understood.” For example, Rockwell has developed turnkey end-of-line quality testing systems for seats, working with the largest Tier 1 automotive seat makers. But even with close cooperation, there is still a tension between functionality and QC testing requirements, according to Scheider. “The socket below each seat is designed to be plugged into the car, not into our quality testing station, resulting in additional complexity and cost for the machine. A better socket design could resolve this,” he says. “In short, EV designs do not yet take themeasurement methodology into consideration that much, as the focus is largely on assuring that a new product is reliably manufacturable,”White says. “However, as the products continue to mature, we believe this will unfold in time as a consideration in the design process.” Good designs exhibit the right balance across a range of considerations, according to Tomkinson, and include cost, performance, manufacture, inspection and in-field maintainability. “There is a growing understanding that inspection operations can’t simply act as a ‘quality goalkeeper’ at the end for its service and maintenance check. Now though, cloud computing can run predictive modelling on each car, accounting for the behaviour of each individual driver. Quality failures can now be detected or anticipated in advance, based on real-time data.” Tomkinson emphasises the growing importance of flexibility as well as automation in quality inspection systems. He points to a growing impetus to adopt automation owing to the shortage of operators caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, and by the trend in western countries to bring production back from regions with lower labour costs. He argues that large up-front capital investments in automated lines are only financially viable when they are amortised over large production volumes, and that they are put at risk if inspection systems lack the flexibility to cope with new EV designs. “It is important therefore that systems are flexible enough to cope with the evolution of new EV parts,” he says. “Against this backdrop, dedicated gauges designed specifically for a single task begin to look limited.” Brandon White notes that measurement technologies are constantly developing to meet the needs of automotive OEMs. “For EV components, and complete vehicles specifically, a major focus has been further developments in flexible vision- based non-contact measurement systems that provide 3D data in a point cloud format for analysis, enabling inspection of a number of components or variations in a single system,” he says. “With EV designs continuing to be revised, and EV sales bringing uncertainty about production volumes, manufacturers are looking to find solutions that are flexible and can handle a large number of different products with minimal tooling and capital investment when a design changes or volume shifts are made.” Design for inspection Efforts to integrate quality control into manufacturing processes must include designing vehicles and all their subsystems and components with inspection in mind, which is a challenge in periods of rapid technological change. Murakami and Ward attest that traditional automotive manufacturers generally pay adequate attention to design for inspection, but the EV industry is not quite there. “While the priority may not always be a friendly design for inspection, there is a dance between suppliers and inspection, often Cameras coupled to machine learning systems in press shops can recognise and mark the finest cracks in sheet metal automatically and reliably in a matter of seconds (Courtesy of Audi)