Electrification is the hottest segment of engineering in the transportation sector right now. And it’s impossible to talk about the automotive industry without discussing electric cars. But there are many in industry who feel that commercial and off the highway applications are the real sweet spot for electrification. This segment is a place where real reductions in operating costs, improvements in overall equipment efficiency and reductions in pollution can all be had at the same time. From an engineering perspective, there are several ways to generate horsepower and torque, and the energy comes from a battery as a DC source. But this doesn’t mean that engineers are restricted to DC motors. Advancements in power semiconductor technology, combined with sophisticated control algorithms allow modern electric propulsion designers to enjoy the multiple control and efficiency benefits of alternating current, offering better efficiency in this battery dependent segment. Jim Anderton was joined in conversation by an expert in the field, Jonah Leason, electrification product manager with Parker-Hannifin.
Welcome to the Design World podcast. I’m Jim Anderton. You know, electrification is the hottest segment of engineering in the transportation sector right now. And it’s impossible to talk about the automotive industry without discussing electric cars. But there are many in industry who feel that commercial and off the highway applications are the real sweet spot for electrification. Places where real reductions in operating costs, improvements in overall equipment efficiency and reductions in pollution can all be had at the same time.
Now, from an engineering perspective, there are several ways to generate horsepower and torque, and the energy comes from a battery as a DC source. But this doesn’t mean that engineers are restricted to DC motors. Now joining me is an expert in this hot field, Jonah Leeson, who’s electrification product manager with Parker Hannifin. Jonah, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks, Jim. Thanks for having me.
Jonah, it’s as I said in the introduction, it’s widely overlooked, I think, in industry, but not, of course, amongst us engineering professionals. But the real juice in electrification, I mean, the real money is often in moving those heavy loads and doing those heavy jobs off the highway, isn’t it?
Absolutely. Yeah. And efficiency really goes up as your speed is, goes down. And so those vehicles that facilitate commerce, let’s talk about like a refuse truck, generally operate at a really low speed, have a lot of braking events where energy can be recuperated or regenerated. And so that’s where you really get a lot of efficiency, improved efficiency by going electric versus having an internal combustion engine drive those vehicles. Yeah.
We’ve noticed that, amongst the commercial truck sector, the vocational trucks seem to be where electrification is really taking hold first. And, of course, you know, the popular media, they all want to do a lot of over the road long haul, you know, examples of this where it’s struggling to sort of get a grip.
But vocationally, I mean, it’s been around forever. I mean, when I was a teenager, you know, summer jobs working at Yale Forklift. I mean, the idea of those DC motors, you remember how those used to work? It was a contactor assembly with two speeds too slow and too fast. And, you know, we’ve come a long way since then.
Yeah, absolutely. It’s amazing how far it’s come since then. But materials handling, like forklifts, is still a big deal for electrification even today. And the bigger ones are, you know, handling containers at ports and things like that are very good targets for electrification. Yeah. Now, Jonah, from a basic sort of engineering standpoint, it’s natural if you’re not working in the field to think, well, my power source is a battery, which means DC current.
So it’s a DC current. I use a controller, I use a DC motor. Bob’s your uncle. Away I go. But the vast majority of the work for the action we see in the industry uses AC motors. So a permanent magnet AC motor is really taking square wave or so it’s not like a sinusoidal AC wave, like an AC, a three phase AC motor would want to take. So there you have a lot of control because your DC input is very stable and it’s providing a really stable voltage. And then the inverter devices chop that up into these. We’ll say square sinusoidal waves or alternating currents. And so that stable power source is what enables very specific and very detailed control of that permanent magnet motor.
Yeah. So it’s you mentioned PW and that’s pulse width modulation for folks who are not working with this every day. You know, you also touched on inverters and it’s getting DC and AC that has historically never been easy for decades. The only way you did that is you literally had a DC motor coupled to an alternator, and you mechanically spun the thing that generates your AC in vacuum tubes and they were expensive, heavy, heat generating ways to do that.
Basically, semiconductors came in and we found, you know, more advanced ways to do that. The inverter has been a headache. And the problem in these systems for, for many, many years is the inverter is still the heart of the problem these days. And that’s still where the energy is. No, I think that there’s been a lot of improvements in the way that those signals are managed. In the 80s there, I think it was Texas Instruments, or maybe it was and I somebody came out with a chip that managed the, complex geometry of the magnetic flux of a rotating, you know, a rotor, in order to compute or make those calculations about when to apply that, magnetic flux that creates torque in the motor. And so because of that chip, being able to process that in real time, in real speed and then make adjustments from there, that’s really what’s enabled the inverters to become more sophisticated and provide solutions into the space. Sure, sure. Now it in terms of, of inverters, the simplest form of inverters, of course, you’re simply just literally chopping the DC and inverting the polarity.
So if you put that on the scope, basically, you know, you see the, the ultimate square wave, so much so there’s almost no vertical trace in some cases just looking sort of like a staircase segment across the scope. When we think of AC, traditionally, we’re thinking of a pure sinusoidal current, because of course, that’s how the textbooks display the thing down there. It is, in fact, that pure sinusoidal form of AC, the optimum waveform form.
If you want to power industrial machines like we’re talking about, no, by chopping it up. So, you know, there’s a lot there’s a lot of things that go into the permanent magnet motor geometry. But you have pole pairs basically. And the more pole pairs that you have, the more precise control you can have of that motor.
So then when you’re chopping those, when you’re taking that direct current and you’re chopping it up, it really gives you a lot more controllability. So if you talk about what you were talking about earlier, about DC and having basically a potentiometer as your speed control, that’s managing the voltage and the speed is relative to the voltage, right? So now with these inverter technologies today, you can control, you know, the height of the wave that’s going in.
You can control the width of the wave. And both of those, you know, varying those two things allow you to vary the performance and the precision control of the permanent magnet motor. You know, it’s an interesting way to think about it. And then maybe you can clear by misconception, a lot of us have about this kind of control as well, which is we know that magnetic field changes when the current changes the actual steady state current confers no magnetic field whatsoever.
And then whether that potential is 0 or 1,000,000V, it doesn’t matter if it’s steady state, nothing’s going to happen. However, the way it changes will induce a magnetic field. But also this is for how long it changes. It will do some magnetic fields. And when you mention things like pulse width modulation, especially of a more of a square wave, I’m imagining this is like a bang bang actuator sort of operating very, very fast.
Whereas imagine a sinusoidal wave. I’m thinking, well, we’re going to gently ramp up the magnetic field and we’re going to gently shut it down there. How does that work as far as the motor sees it coming out of the inverter. Yeah. That’s a good point. So you’re right, the changing of the magnetic field is what changes the flux and the resistance of that flux by the permanent magnet.
That provides the torque. So the little devices that are in there that we use today are transistors, basically, but they’re acting as switches. And there’s two main types. There’s MOSFET devices or IGBT and then there’s the silicon carbide MOSFET. And so those two technologies are competing today. Everybody sees silicon carbide as the future.
And it really is because of the efficiency that it can offer. And really it’s back to that point. You want to be switching these devices off and on and allowing that current through. And the IGBT generates more heat versus the silicon carbide devices. They generate less heat because there’s less dwell in that switch action. Right. So as we’re increasing, you know, we’ve got inverter technology that’s IGBT based.
We’re doing a lot of research right now and trying to select the right silicon carbide based, switching devices for our inverter technology. But really when you’re making so many switches so quickly, it really makes a big difference. And how much dwell time you have in those heat zones and how much energy you have to dissipate.
That dissipates the heat versus powering the motor or providing torque. You know, that intuitively makes sense. And to think about it is that if you spend less time switching as simply less time to heat up, that that wafer in the semiconductor, and that’s less to worry about. I know that heat is I mean, heat is a non-trivial problem for people engineering these systems down here.
I’ve seen liquid cooling systems and, you know, packaging problems, all kinds of stuff. How much of a difference can it makes, with heat reduction, using a strategy like you’re talking about? Yeah. I mean, so if you look at, you know, an internal combustion engine is 30 to 40% efficient if you’re operating at a steady state.
And if you’re doing a bad job at electric powertrains, you’ve got 80%. So, there you just doubled your efficiency right out of the gate. And so, then every step, you know, it’s kind of like the diesel engine. A lot of the advances in a diesel engine have been through the fuel injection. Right? So, increasing pressure, increasing, the amount of air that you can get into the cylinder by turbo, by adding turbo compression, when you’re drawing air in. So when we talk about this, you know, it’s, we’ll say less than 10%, probably less than 5% difference between an IGBT device versus a silicon carbide device. But when you’re talking about the cost of batteries, that makes a big difference. Yeah, every percent really helps either, enable that vehicle to operate longer in its day, to perform more tasks, to get more jobs done, or in smaller battery systems, really decreasing the size of the battery.
So even though those, you know, it might be less than 5% difference between an IGBT and a silicon carbide because of the cost of the batteries, it really pencils out pretty quickly on making those advances in the in the technology. Now, advanced inverter technology, advanced controls are not cheap. Nothing ever in this business, so the question is it is, is cost a driving factor for engineers running this equipment?
That’s a complex topic really, because, you know, the larger the equipment, typically the lower volume it is, and the lower volume it is, the less you know, I wouldn’t say it’s not important, but the less important it becomes, because really, as we work to electrify this equipment that hasn’t been electrified before, it’s really about uptime.
So, reliability outweighs efficiency. Getting the job done and having the right solution outweighs efficiency. Right now, in this electrification world. Now fast forward ten years from now, it’s going to be okay. Now we can get the job down, and we need to eke out every bit of efficiency out of that equipment, right? Because then your product differentiation, you’re starting to see it in the passenger cars today.
You know who’s got the most range. And in the commercial vehicle world it’s a little bit different. You need to be able to operate in a typical shift or have a charging strategy that enables you to implement this electrified equipment. But it’s about having uptime and having functionality of that vehicle, because if it’s not working, if it’s not going, it’s not facilitating commerce, it’s not generating revenue, right?
If that equipment’s not working, so there are tradeoffs there. But I would say right now, you know, our customers in the offroad space will give up 5 or 10% if it’s a bulletproof solution that is facilitating commerce, it’s getting the job done. It’s doing the work that needs to be done. Yeah. You know, that makes sense.
This is a different market. We’re talking about multi-million-dollar equipment, mission critical equipment, as you say, where, you know, a, you can’t have a giant, an open pit mine. Stop because of a semiconductor failure. You know, they think about reliability in terms of mean time between failures or is it simply a matter of give me 15,000 hours of runtime, after which I’ll swap it out and we’ll go from there?
You know, in today’s world, they’ve really adapted to what the equipment is capable of. And I’ll just share a story about mining. Like, if you’ve got a hot mine and you’re talking about, you know, thousands of dollars an hour cost of downtime, 10,000$, $20,000 an hour for some mines. They’ve really adapted. So, they’ve got hot spares on the shelf, like, let’s say, you know, one of their reliability challenges is keeping a hydraulic pump running.
Well, not only do they have a hot spare on the shelf and technicians that can get in there and swap that out quickly, but they also have somebody that’s probably a third party that’s remanufacturing those on site. So, then they’ve got somebody that’s rebuilding hydraulics pumps because they know that they’re a wear item and they want to keep the mine going.
Right. So, because of that, they’ve adapted their practices in the way that they do their work in the internal combustion world. And so, we’ll see a lot of that in the electrification world too. Whether they’ll keep an extra inverter on the shelf, they’ll keep an extra, you know, if it’s really a pain point for them in their operation of that mine or another way that we look at it is in agriculture, you got to make hay when the sun shines, right?
There’s only so much of a window to harvest when it’s time to harvest. And so that’s where, you know, you get big agricultural companies that’ll buy an extra combine. And that’s a big piece of, you know, that’s a half $1 million piece of equipment to just have sitting there. But if you need it and you’ve got it, you’re in a much better place than if you need it and you don’t have it right.
Those pinch points have always been there. They’ll change and adapt a little bit as we electrify that equipment. But generally, those applications and markets really know how to keep their operations up and going. But no supplier wants to be the shut the system that shuts down a mine or stops the harvest.
Engineers working in this sector, do they order off the shelf solutions or do they approach you and say, you know, look, here’s, here’s my motor parameters. Our motor design is locked in. Basically, these are our batteries, our available power density. Help me. Yes or no?
So right now, because the volumes are relatively low, both we and they’re adapting their current products to the electrified products. So that means that they have got to solve problems. Like finding places to put batteries on their chassis. They have got a lot of packaging challenges because the volume isn’t there to do a clean sheet design on their piece of equipment. And that’s what we see in the commercial vehicle world today. Not that things would change a lot, right?
You got two big frame rails that are holding a bunch of stuff on a commercial vehicle, and not that a clean sheet design would change a lot of that, but it’s adapting now, so they’re taking what’s already diesel driven and they’re adapting it to an electrification, which means the volumes are relatively low. The business case isn’t there to clean sheet a design to electrify things.
So that also means that they’re looking for more products that are off the shelf, less bespoke products. So, a lot of the bespoke products that we see in the electrification space are in the passenger car, where you’ve got a motor that’s deeply integrated into some kind of gear set, that’s deeply integrated into the chassis in some way, and that’s a very bespoke.
But you’re talking about hundreds of thousands of those volume wise, versus a big bespoke piece of mining equipment or unique piece of mining equipment. They might only make ten 15, 20 a year on a good year when they have a lot of mines up and running. So, they’re, you know, again, volume doesn’t dictate that they want to afford a bespoke piece of technology to integrate into that.
So that’s really where Parker shines, because Parker has such a great understanding of our customer base. They have a great understanding of the multiple markets that really enjoy our products. You know, we talked about commercial vehicles, mining, construction, Ag you know, those folks, the volumes are so low relative to passenger car that they’re really wanting to accept off the shelf technology for probably the next 10 to 20 years.
Again, as we get out there into the future and there’s more, there’s a need for more product differentiation because the market has decided that electrification is the way to go. Then we’ll start to get into more bespoke designs. But even then, they’re looking for, you know, modularity and scalability, where they can use leverage as much commonality between products as possible.
And I did some work for a commercial vehicle company where we were even looking at modular, scalable batteries. Right. So how many different form factors do I need? How many different bricks do I need to design so that I can package the same batteries on three different brands of vehicle and three different models within each brand?
It’s a different challenge to solve when you’re trying to thread the needle and find products that’ll do that will cover most of your product line. And again that goes back to efficiency to are you going to take, you know, do you want to take a couple percent hit on efficiency and have a product that you’re able to apply to multiple models, multiple brands potentially, or, you know, knowing that it’s not going to be the exact efficiency fit for all of those? Or do you want to drive volume and you want to have the same component because you’re trying to drive volume, you’re trying to get to hundreds of thousands of these specific components across multiple products or multiple models. Yeah. And, along those lines, you anticipate our next question, which I am hearing from the OEMs, is that they’re at a point now where competitively, they’re chasing every fraction of a percent of efficiency they can find. I mean, they’re going over that, they’re talking to the roller bearing manufacturers, you know, to try and reduce drag and wheel bearings. Crazy stuff. Stuff I never would have imagined would even be a factor. But they’re chasing it as a fraction of a percent at a time. Are you under that kind of pressure or are they turning around?
You’re starting with an already intrinsically efficient system to begin with, compared, as you mentioned, to internal combustion engines, are they leaning on your bit and saying, look, can you give me another half a percent here? Again, going back to that, you know, they need fit for purpose that’s robust in application, you know, so really up time because it gets to acceptability because there are barriers.
There are still barriers. We’re still in that early adopter phase for off road and even large on road equipment. And so, to do that you really have to provide a product that’s bulletproof, a product that’s delivering and that the driver wants to be. And right, it’s reducing some of other pain points, like there’s less noise in the cabin. So they are less stressful as far as noise goes.
They can hear more what’s going around them. Performance like, you know, one of the great things about electric powertrains is you get all the torque off the line, right? Which, you know, we could talk about, but to the point where you have to then pedal map, right, so that you’re not giving drivers all the torque off the line because they’re going through tires.
And then your cost of operation goes up. But really, instead of leaning on us against cost and really beating on us against efficiency right now and especially in the off-road space, it’s about making it work, making it function for the intended workday. And then driving to that, reliability target that they have, you know, is there life at 10,000 hours?
Is that at 30,000 hours, you know, and then how do I then take those products that are engineered for 20,000, 30,000 hours and apply it to 1000-hour machine, like a tractor or something like that? So, they’re more figuring out what the customer needs. And this is the other interesting part about the electrification in the offroad space and large commercial vehicles, those products have been adapting 50 to 100 years.
An excavator today looks almost the same structurally as an excavator 50 years ago, 70 years ago. So, they haven’t necessarily taken the time to write down all the requirements for how that machine needs to behave, how that machine needs to operate, what the feel and what the fit, feel and function of that machine is. So, a lot of what they need to do right now is capture what their performance needs are.
And we’ve had a lot of success working with customers, going out to the diesel equivalent and taking data and providing that data and saying, okay, well, look, this is the performance that you’re getting. These are the power parameters for what you’re getting. We’re going to peel that back because we know we’re going to get more efficient. We know we’re going to have more availability of torque on the low end.
And this is our recommendation for sizing for you. So, getting the right size, having the scalability to then you know, go smaller go bigger. And making sure it’s robust to a general guide we’ll say what the product requirements are. And that’s just the nature of it. Right? We in North America especially didn’t sit down to write down, you know, I need this much flow at this much pressure in order to lift my excavator bucket this much right.
So now we’re going to go and do those calculations. Most of the time, the most efficient way to do that is off real vehicle data. That is interesting, because that is contrary to the way that we think, the way design engineering is going, where basically we want it. We want to have an idea, we want to iterate, we want to throw it some thought, some simulation software, and we want to ideally go with no prototype.
We want to hit the button on production basis. We have a perfectly functioning machine. And you’re telling me that empirically. Now you need to find out what this equipment is doing in the field before we can figure out how we’re going to electrify it? Yeah, exactly. It’s really interesting coming from so I was born, and I started my engineering career in the commercial vehicle world.
And we were starting to write down those requirements as needed. Right. And when we needed to go and specify and source equipment, as we were letting go of more and more of what we manufactured and what we took upon ourselves to manufacture and deliver on to our own products. So, there were technology decisions to make versus buy.
And as you buy more, you have to have more and more sophisticated requirements. But there’s also that that paradigm where you’ve evolved your product to this point, you’re making incremental changes that don’t necessarily need to have that kind of litigious documentation. Passenger car, totally different story. They’ve had to develop because they’re building 100,000 to 5 million of these products.
They have to be very well documented on what those performance requirements are, how they’re validated, so that you have a do a loop and you can tweak things along the way like, oh, we tested this, you know, in northern Minnesota, but we really should have gone up to Yellowknife to winter test it. Right. And so, then they’re making minor tweaks on an established set of requirements. The low volume nature of commercial vehicles, both on and off road, is that they didn’t necessarily have to sit down and write those requirements down as they’ve evolved.
So much to talk about, never enough time to talk about it all. So, one last question. It’s an important one for design engineers working in this space. How do they approach you as an individual? Or Parker-Hannifin as a company? What questions do they need to ask to sort of hit the ground running and figure out what they need?
Yeah, it really comes down to performance because we can calculate power based on performance. And that’s, you know what a lot of them want because they are transitioning internal combustion engine equipment to electrification.
Most of the time they have a good idea of what some of the performance parameters are. Really what our application engineers end up doing is trying to calculate or figure out what that power needs are, what you need to know, what the motor torque needs to be, at what speed, so that we can get you in the right size motor and the right size inverter.
And, get it right on the first try. So that’s really what a lot of our application engineers do is really sizing activities. And we offer that as a service because not everybody wants to go and hire five engineers to go and do sizing exercises. Right. We can prove to our customers that we’re able to size those components efficiently and correctly, accurately, then they don’t have to staff those types of roles. And they can put their engineers on other parts of the program.
Jonah Leason, electrification product manager with Parker-Hannifin, thanks for joining me on the podcast.
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