Putting the speed into electric-land-speed

Power and automation technology supplier ABB could be taking its place in the record books in early June when its drives and motors equipment will be used to power the British challenger to the world electric-land-speed record. The attempt, on the Chott-el-Jerid salt flats in Tunisia, is scheduled to begin June 9.

An ABB industrial drive and two 50 horsepower AC motors will be used to drive the ABB e=motion electric car to speeds in excess of the current world record of 245.523 mph held by the White Lightning team from the U.S.

Based on the data from development and testing, the car could also set another first - if it becomes the first-ever electrically powered vehicle to break the 300 mph limit.

Already gone 146 mph
With its motors producing a combined output of more than 500bhp, ABB’s system already helped propel the ABB e=motion car to 146 mph during testing, unofficially breaking the 139 mph U.K. record for the fastest speed traveled by an electric vehicle, and equaling the first-ever land-speed record set by Sir Malcolm Campbell’s gasoline-powered car in 1924.

The vehicle’s designers, Mark Newby and Colin Fallows, will attempt to set the new world record between June 9 and June 11.

How Does the Car Work? Logically
When building the car, Newby and Fallows set a goal of using only equipment that could be sourced easily off-the-shelf from any supplier, both to reduce the cost of the project and to add to the prestige of the challenge.

ABB’s system uses a standard inverter from ABB’s ACS800 motor drives line to convert the 600V DC output from the car’s four packs of lead-acid batteries into AC power for the two motors; the motors are commonly supplied by ABB for use in machine tool and a host of other applications.

To qualify as an official world record under FIA rules, the car must perform two recorded runs at better than 252 mph over a distance of one kilometer (.622 mile), requiring the motors to reach speeds in excess of 6,000 rpm.

To put this into context, in ordinary use, the motors would normally run at between 1,000 and 3,000 rpm. So, to prevent overheating during the world-record attempt, each motor has been adapted to include a forced-ventilation system that’s comprised of a 24V DC fan, to help keep the motors within their maximum operating temperature of 180ºC (356ºF).

PT100 sensors fitted to each motor winding provide real-time information about the motor operating temperature and also serve to protect the motors from overheating. As further protection, the team will also use nitrogen to bring down the motor temperature, after the car has made its first run during the land-speed-record attempt.

Immediate, high torque critical to start and acceleration
A major consideration in designing the drive system for the car was the ability to accelerate quickly to achieve maximum speed within the permitted distance.

For this reason, ABB’s drive system also features ABB’s Direct Torque Control (DTC) drive technology, which provides excellent control of motor torque, with full motor torque available, even at zero speed.

“Other challengers to the record commonly use gear-driven systems in their cars to achieve the fastest possible acceleration, whereas the technology we’ve supplied steadily controls torque across the whole speed range,” said Frank Griffith, one of the team at ABB who helped develop the car’s power system. “Although a geared vehicle can achieve 100 mph in a few seconds, its rate of acceleration falls away much more quickly compared to our system; this one will continue to accelerate even past the 300 mph mark, provided sufficient battery power is available.”

The system’s ability was proven during the car’s first test run at the Bruntingthorpe airfield in Leicestershire, U.K., in 2003. The car unofficially beat the existing British electric-land-speed record within one-third of the distance traveled by the current official title holder.

“The car used by the Bluebird team, which holds the current British electric-land-speed record, reached a top speed of 139 mph over a distance of two miles. In its first-ever test run, ABB e=motion easily reached 146 mph within a little more than 1,000 yards. The only reason we had to stop the car was because we ran out of road,” said Newby. “With this sort of performance, we’re convinced that our car can beat easily the existing world electric-land-speed record.”

Design challenges in building the car
For Newby and Fallows, finding a company that could supply the equipment needed to power the car proved a frustrating struggle that lasted 18 months.

Before contacting ABB, they approached two leading drives manufacturers, neither of which could provide the technology needed.

“Finding a company that could supply the necessary technology to drive the car was the biggest single technical hurdle we faced in building the car,” said Fallows, who designed the car. “Of the companies we originally approached, none could provide either the technology or expertise that justified a world-record attempt of this magnitude. In fact, one suggested a water-cooled drive solution which resulted in us extending the nose of the vehicle by some 5 feet – at great expense.”

Electrical design team excels
The answer came in November 2002, when they approached ABB and found the company could provide a solution that met their needs perfectly.

“We initially approached ABB because we were aware of its profile in the world of electrical engineering,” said Fallows. “Its solution proved extremely compact and means our car does not even need to be the 33 feet that it is.”

The drive system developed for the ABB e=motion car is the work of members of ABB’s drives application engineering team: Frank Griffith, Steve Malpass and John Schofield. For this team, one of the biggest challenges was the need to simulate the vehicle dynamics and performance likely to be experienced during the land-speed-record attempt without the starting the car.

“We initially had to develop our system without physically testing the car on a track,” said Griffith. “Likely performance was modeled and calculated using a set of estimated conditions involving factors such as rolling resistance, drag and battery discharge rate. Much of this information either did not exist or else had to be extrapolated from data found on the Internet, such as when we were trying to obtain figures for potential tire resistance at 300 mph. Not only that, but we only had a limited amount of space available for installing our system in the car, so we had to ensure that whatever we came up with was also compact.”

To help fine-tune the system’s performance, ABB used data from the two independent four-channel data loggers incorporated within the drive. During testing, the data loggers were used to collect a range of data on drive and motor status, which was uploaded to a PC for analysis using ABB’s Drives Window tool.

“The data loggers enabled us to improve the performance of our system in the same way as Formula One teams do with their cars,” said Malpass. “One of the data loggers was set to a rapid sampling rate of one sample per millisecond to record all the actual events as they happened.

“By setting the other logger to a slower rate, we were able to record information on trends that occurred throughout the test runs, which provided us with an overall picture of how the car was faring,” he said.

Using the data loggers proved invaluable in tracing the cause of higher-than-expected torque, which occurred during several of the test runs at Bruntingthorpe.

“The acceleration data collected during the test runs indicated much higher torque than we’d expected,” said Griffith. “After examining all of the mechanical and electrical factors, we were relieved to find that this was actually due to the track being on a 2-inch incline, something which we hadn’t noticed previously.”

Power with potential
With several weeks still to go until the attempt, Newby and Fallows are already planning their next attempt to take their car even faster.

ABB (www.abb.com) provides power and automation technologies that enable utility and industry customers to improve performance while lowering environmental impacts. The ABB Group of companies operates in more than 100 countries and employs about 139,000 people worldwide. The company's U.S. operations employ more than 14,000 people in manufacturing and other facilities in 40 states.

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