During early 2019, Hallam became involved in a series of design and prototyping projects for electric motor components for a UK-based electric motor manufacturer supplying the electric automotive industry. The components included rotor components and housings for synchronous AC motor assemblies and the projects drew on Hallam’s long-standing experience in designing and manufacturing AC motor components and assemblies.
The requirement was for designs and prototypes for components for PM motor variants to allow bench testing and application trialling and the main challenge was to ensure that design features would achieve the required performance characteristics. A key constraint was the feature limitations imposed by the manufacturing processes to be deployed (i.e. these projects were challenging from a design-for-manufacture perspective.)
Hallam’s knowledge of design aspects and related performance advantages in this particular specialist area proved to be very valuable. Hallam has an extensive library of design and performance features for this type of product, together with physical examples spanning several decades of product development. The customer’s designers still required unique design features, including bosses and finning to achieve mechanical stability at high rotation speeds to be incorporated in the new component range however, and extensive trialling was necessary.
The projects have had unusually pressing urgency in view of the need for the ultimate finished products (electric vehicles) to reach domestic markets rapidly and five different components have been designed, prototyped and transferred to volume manufacture, which Hallam now undertakes using PPAP level 4 process control techniques via CNC CMM facilities.
