Job creation is not a political act.  Politicians create nothing, except maybe more red tape or hiring more people to process more red tape.

Real job creation starts when someone gets a good idea and turns it into something useful.  Sometimes, people get great ideas that transform the way we live, and they get rich in the process.  Good for them.  And good for us.  I like air conditioning, I like cellphones, and I like great sounding music and a cold drink on a hot Texas afternoon.

Politicians can rarely help this process.  The best thing they can do is get out of the way.  Quit making it more difficult to do business.  Protect the country from foreign invasion and provide for domestic security.  Let the rest of us get to work.  Be wary when government promises to make things better for you, it comes with a very hefty price tag.

The economic changes that are taking place are dramatic, and just getting started.  Part of the reason there aren’t more jobs is that a lot of factories are being transformed by information technology and hard automation technology.  It takes fewer people to run a facility these days.  And fundamentally, that’s what it takes to compete in the world market.

What is less clear is that the great gains in productivity allow American factory workers to earn an average of $24.11 per hour and production managers in highly automated industries earn $33.61 per hour.  Both workers will be competing with Chinese workers whose wages rose from $0.50 an hour in 2000 to an expected $4.50 an hour by 2015 according to Boston Consulting.  Those numbers should give us all pause for what it will take to stay competitive.  But given the high productivity of American workers, the high quality and yield, and reduced transportation costs for goods in the US, there is hope for much improvement in the next few years.

Some of the efficiency is a result of increasing automation.  The robot market is undergoing dramatic transformation as new robot offerings from companies like Universal Robots extend lower pricing and easier programming to prospective new users.  The semiconductor industry continues to drive electronics prices resulting in lower cost to implement control and communications.  All of which results in expanding applications.  And expanding opportunities for those suppliers.

Job growth will come from a different direction.  New manufacturing technologies like 3D printers, will begin to work their way into the mainstream and create new businesses that didn’t exist before.  Companies like MakerBot that start with 3 or 4 people pushing an idea into the real world, will create businesses that grow to 50 or 100 employees.  Multiply this time thousands of new ideas that are getting started every day.

This is where real job creation takes place.  And mechatronics will play a part in it, all the way.

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Let’s take these two options separately.  In last week’s post I mentioned the large diameter fan in a cooling tower.  That load has a lot of friction in it due the nature of the blade’s opposition to the air.  This helps slow the load to a stop in the event that the fan motor loses power completely.  And since there is usually a gearbox to provide mechanical advantage to the motor in starting and maintaining the load, that same gearbox provides significant inertia load to slow down the fan blades by increasing the apparent inertia of the rotor mass.

This is not always a bad thing.  Many times the frictional aspect of the load conditions will help during deceleration and during power failures.  The only real caution here is don’t forget to include friction in the description of the load when you are sizing a motor.  I had a friend provide me with a very elegant 11 page analysis of the load inertia of a special conveyor.  After we got done building it, we noticed that the drives seemed extremely under powered.  It turned out the inertia calculations were perfect, but he had forgotten to include the friction, which was so large that it caused us to have to increase the motor size by two frame sizes.  It was a very expensive lesson for all of us.

With respect to hitting things, this can be a real problem, especially in the world of robots.  High speed, repetitive motion requires a lot of electromechanical energy.   Stopping these systems is not as easy as it looks.  Stopping when something unexpected gets in the way is usually out of the question.

I was surprise to learn of a company that had starting working on the problem of how to create safe robots a few years ago, and their solution was so successful that the company is now doing 14 million Euros and operating all over the world.  The company is Universal Robots.  Their robots are lightweight, low cost and include high speed torque control algorithms that sense a collision as a torque disturbance that does not match the planned trajectory.  Just as the StopSaw can stop a turning saw blade at 6000 RPM, the robot’s torque loop sensors respond in a couple of milliseconds and safely disable the robot.

This makes the robot safe for human “collaboration” without the need for complex safety curtains.  This feature, among many others, makes the robot much more suited to industrial application and is paving the way to applying robots with paybacks of less than 1 year in some cases.

It’s amazing what a couple of grad students can come up with, with a little encouragement from industry and help from their government and private investment community.  The investors guessed right and we will be seeing a lot of Universal Robots in the near future.

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In the mechatronics world, things are a bit more stressful.  Starting an electric motor is definitely the worst thing you can do.  In the case of a standard AC motor, all the electric power is coming into the motor and in 16 milliseconds, one AC waveform, the motor is trying to get to full speed, typically 1800 rpm. In large AC machines the starting process can last for almost 4 seconds during which time no significant work has been done.  This is because the electrons moving into the wire have to magnetize the stator and the stator in turn magnetizes the bars in the rotor after which rotation can begin.

The electrical time constant of the winding is only part of the picture.  The mechanical time constant is made up of the time required to overcome the inertia of the rotor.  The inertia mass of a cast aluminum rotor with iron bars in it is significant and the rotor mass is increasing as the square of the radius, so it’s a big deal as you move into larger machines.  None of this considers the load, which after all, is what the motor is there to deal with.

When you have a large diameter fan, as in a cooling tower, the starting problems are worse still.  For a 50 horsepower motor with a 20 foot diameter fan blade attached to it, the starting stresses are enormous.  This leads to an increase in all the structure and support for the system.  Now, starting the motor involves huge inrush currents with the associate power consumption.  So the cost of starting the load is also reflected in the cost of the gearbox, bearings and support structure.  These factors have lead to the introduction of special motors and variable frequency drives that are designed specifically with single stage planetary gear reducers in the output of the motor and larger output shaft and bearing construction to allow direct mounting of fan blades.  Check out the Baldor offering for HVAC.

The other side of the motion profile is stopping the load.  Obviously for a fan load, nobody cares particularly.  The fan blade can coast to a stop and if it takes 30 seconds or a minute, that’s fine.  What happens when a robot is involved?  It’s a totally different situation, stopping is everything, especially if there are human beings in proximity to the robot work envelope.

This will be the topic of next week’s post.

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However, it was the automotive industry that gave the world the platform-engineering concept by having people from different departments share ideas and develop a synergy. As the automotive industry looked for new and better ways to engineer their machining centers to best serve customers’ requirements, they looked inside the box.

Collective ways to develop synergy was to train current builders in all areas necessary to give them a 30,000-foot view of any project, which puts the mechatronics philosophy in action. Machine tools and highly automated machining centers were better engineered, more easily built and used to benefit the customer in the field. Builders had a skilled team of mechatronic engineers who worked directly with customers to guarantee the machines built will achieve optimum functionality in operation. This process has led, in conjunction with advanced computer and imaging technology plus embedded process control technology developments, to the emergence of virtual production. In a virtual environment, the machining center is used to image, test run and validated for production rates.

Emag

www.emag.com

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The so-called “revolution” is the order of magnitude drop in the cost of 3D printing.  From the SLS machines of 20 years ago at 6 figure prices, to recent high performance machines in the $20-30K range, we now have an explosion of machines at prices below$3000. and some as low as $300.  This means that the barrier to creating new products has dropped by 2 orders of magnitude.  Similarly for people who want to get into the 3D machinery manufacturing business, the cost of entry has fallen as well.

Consider the problem of material processing.  3D printers work by melting the source material, usually a plastic wire) and depositing it as a liquid to form the object you have a solid model of.  While the stereolithography machines of the past had significant limitations due to the strength of the polymers they were using, today’s consumer level 3D printers are similarly limited to specific materials with relatively low melt temperatures.  ABS, glass filled ABS and some polycarbonates are available as feed wires, but these materials have relatively low strength compared to metals like aluminum and steel.

3D printers do resolve the problem of how to make parts in low volume so that the cost of test marketing, or in some cases, new market introduction of products, can be supported with processes that are extremely cost effective.  Certainly, the cost of machining parts in small batches or making a mold for injection molding can be avoided and the cost of printed parts is relatively cheap.

But it doesn’t work well for metals.  Yet.  There are a number of manufacturers who have demonstrated metal printing technology like Direct Metal Laser Sintering.  Several processes have been demonstrated for making metal parts from relatively difficult materials like stainless steel and even titanium.  Today these machines are very expensive and slow.  If they follow along the lines of the plastics, a major drop in prices will change the world of manufacturing forever.

The basic economics of metalworking has been material removal.  What if that changes? What if an engine block for a car can be “grown” in 3D and post machined on the wear surfaces and tapped for threads in blind holes that are already present?  No matter how complex the internal geometry, the block can be produced as a native single piece of metal with almost no waste.  Surface finish machining can be done much more accurately and quickly.  At some point the additive process could displace a lot of machining.

Can we create the cost effective manufacturing of the future? (to be continued)

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Omron Foundation has donated both equipment and funding to create the new lab which will enhance instruction for mechanical, electrical, and computer engineering students, and enable collaboration on course work and senior design projects. With the addition of this lab, students will gain exposure to Omron technologies, allowing them to explore machine control, motion, vision and safety disciplines in the mechatronics field. Additionally, Omron SYSMAC technologies will be available to conduct new cutting edge industrial automation and robotics research within this laboratory.

Omron Foundation is proud of its longstanding support of NIU engineering students, beginning in 1989 with the establishment of the Omron Foundation Electronic Engineering Scholarship Fund. The foundation has supported various student engineering endeavors including Engineers without Borders, and continues to do so today with the establishment of this new laboratory.

Omron Foundation congratulates NIU CEET on its continued efforts to provide robust theory and practical application of engineering concepts with this new Robotics and Mechatronics lab.

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The control system is entirely focused around a DC motor speed control and PM gearmotor.  A long arm sits on top of the steel strip as it is unrolled into the forming machine and cam-operated limit switches sense the height of the loops of steel.  If the loop is high, it turns on the motor until there is enough excess in the loop to satisfy the speed of the forming process downstream.  The low end of the slack loop turns the motor off so it won’t feed out more material.  Simple yet effective.

In analyzing the control requirement, everything depends on understanding the requirement and understanding the mechanics of the control elements themselves.  Consider the humble start stop station.  The operation of the motor is completely dependent on the idea that  the start pushbutton is a momentary switch from a mechanical standpoint and that there is auxiliary contact on the starter that will act to maintain control power when the momentary start signal opens.  The stop pushbutton is a normally closed pushbutton so that when it opens, control power to the starter coil is interrupted, disconnecting the motor from it’s power source.  Nice, neat, simple, and full of assumptions about the mechanical operation of the control system elements.

What if the start pushbutton is a maintained input?  Control power to the motor starter is maintained through the contact block.  This would eliminate the need for an auxiliary contact to “seal in” the starter.  This would require that the stop pushbutton be maintained as well so that the motor cannot accidentally get power and start up until the start pushbutton is reset.  This setup would be OK but the reset of the start pushbutton is not clear and would require a unique mechanical implementation in order for the start switch to operate the circuit as required.

A better option to simplify the system would be to use the same operator in a push to make, push to break mechanism.  We see these devices in everyday application, but they probably require a mechanical latch and spring mechanism which might be considered slightly less reliable in an industrial context.  Still, the push-push approach with a two or three state LED indicator would be really cool.  The pushbutton would be green to start, turn red to designate the button is now a stop pushbutton, and yellow if some internal fault is detected.  This approach eliminates all the other devices in the control system.

But it requires a great deal of mechanical complexity to execute and some internal intelligence if the self diagnostic feature is going to be implemented.  Can we cost engineer this device to compete with the traditional start-stop station?  I could be wrong, but I doubt it.

But it does make clear that, as with all things in the industrial control arena, everything depends on a good mechanical understanding.

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Amazingly the auto industry has evolved with the necessary manufacturing precision and repeatability to meet the requirements of making reliable engines and vehicles that operate 5 years without major failures.  I have managed to own and operate 2 cars that were 10+ years old and in generally good running order when I sold them.

Electric cars, on the other hand, have essentially 1 moving part.  The rotor of the electric motor.  Hybrid electric vehicles have small displacement fuel engines that run at constant speed and only turn on when additional battery charge is required.  Pretty simple.

Electric cars also have a lower cost of fuel per mile driven based on the extremely high efficiency of the conversion.  Gasoline combustion conversion efficiency is less than 20% with most of the energy being wasted as heat.  This could be greatly increased by newer technology like opposing piston engines or wave combustion engines.  The best gasoline fuel cars cost 12 cents per mile if you use 30mpg an $3.60/gal.  In town mileage costs are a lot higher.  Electric cars are estimated to get 3 miles per kilowatt, which depending on where you live could be about 4 cents per mile.

Electric vehicles which have little or no maintenance would have little or no costs associated with the running of the car.  Combined with lower operating costs per mile the electric vehicle becomes an extremely attractive option.  If you have solar panels on the roof of the garage, the “fuel” cost could be zero after the cost of the solar power system costs are recovered.  At a guess, that could take about 5 years.  But it’s a really cool concept.

Light weight vehicles, at half the curb weight of the current of the 3500 pound Chevy Volt, are also likely to cost a lot less.  What we need are a bunch of new companies, with a bunch of new lightweight electric and hybrid vehicles.  If the vehicles can be profitably brought to market, they would create huge demand.

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The basic idea of the car is essentially to power wheels for motion.   Looked at as a mechatronic problem, the simple answer is to use a belt and pulleys.  The mechanical advantage of this approach makes the torque requirement much lower and avoids the huge stresses of turning an extremely large load from a shaft.  Why the car guys don’t get this is beyond me.  But we have a long standing tradition of doing things the hard way, so I won’t interfere.  For the moment.

Then there is the very simple F=ma.  The bigger the “m”, vehicle weight, the more “F” you need.  IF you want to push a 5800 pound car, you’re going to need a lot of horsepower.  If you want to push the 5800 pound car to 60 miles an hour in less than 4 seconds your going to need a Corvette with 500 horsepower.  All it takes is a little extra cash.

Then come all the complex subsystems.  Engine horsepower is consumed by parasitic loads like air conditioning, alternator charging of the electrical system, hydraulic pumps to boost brake fluid pressure, etc.  Numerous electrical features like the new generation of power steering assist, powered windows and windshield wipers are all examples of simple electromechanical actuators with power electronics and intelligent controls.  At a certain level, it’s amazing that all this stuff works as well as it does.

When Consumer Reports does a survey of customer satisfaction about cars reliability, they get some interesting results.  Among which, notably, is the Nissan Leaf.  As one of a very few pure electric production cars, the Leaf gets about 3 miles per kilowatt hour  If you are in a low cost of electricity market, at 12 cents/kWhr then your cost of energy per transportation mile is about 4 cents.  Which compares favorably with nearly 20 cents per mile for gasoline powered cars.

What really makes it interesting is that the pure electric has nothing to maintain except the batteries.  No trips to the shop for oil changes and filters, no regular maintenance to speak of.  Which means incredible reliability and low cost of operation.

Getting back to the F=ma question, at a vehicle curb weight of 3500 pounds, we need a dozen car companies producing lighweight versions of the car at 1750 pounds to really make this work.  A lower vehicle weight could translate to double the driving range or half the battery pack.  Given that a lithium battery pack is the most expensive part of the car, I’ll take the smaller battery pack.

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This is hard to say.  The number of solar companies declaring bankruptcy was alarming last year.  The recent announcement of SunTech’s failure in China is extremely disturbing.  If the Chinese aren’t breaking even on solar panels at this point in the learning curve, who can?

The wind market, despite a record year, continues to get a lot of bad press.  A recently published research study from a top climate scientist suggested that if wind turbines were allowed to proliferate to the point that they could supply all the power needed worldwide, that the wake effects would have a more severely damaging effect on weather patterns than all the equivalent CO2.  A serious indictment from the science community that should be wind power’s most staunch ally.  That is even before we get to the financial performance of wind power that has been documented as low as 10% in some projects.

Historically the renewables market has been subsidized by federal and state tax incentives, and frankly, by direct transfer payment in communities where electric power utilities have been mandated by state governments to provide cash incentives for solar projects.  In addition, the federal government has provided billions of dollars in low cost Department of Energy loans to companies developing technology.  There is a lot of public money going into this arena without public consent and with a very poor track record of success.

The real shame of it will be that we are close to the goal of grid parity in solar and now that we are within sight of the goal, there won’t be a lot of private equity taking a risk where the government and all it’s billions has not succeeded.  It appears likely that solar can achieve a cost of $1.50/Watt in the very near future, then solar can break even in less than 4 years even in markets where electric prices are $.11/kWhr making solar a reasonable investment.  If the FHA were to allow new homes purchases to include solar, the market would take off without public money subsidizing the technology.

In the wind market, a new paradigm has to be created.  New smaller equipment designs and the ability to locate wind in areas where there is high uptime are the only way wind can make sense.  And there are people attempting to solve these design problems.

Regardless of which technology you like, solar or wind, both have a major weakness, the need for storage.  Solar does not provide power and night and the wind doesn’t always blow.  Smart Grid technology is a powerful resource that can help buffer the problem, but you can’t change the laws of physics, even if you are the President of the United States.

The increased number of installations in 2012 were largely the result of manufacturers recognizing that the federal funding programs were set to expire at the end of the year.  Every possible project was pushed forward resulting in record installations.  Will this be repeated in 2013?  Hard to say.  Many companies did not expect Congress to renew the subsidies, which they did at the very last minute.

What’s the future of renewables?  Your guess is as good as mine.

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Not that other ideas weren’t tried.  I remember Boolean programming and some other variants that were attempted due to the variety of solutions being offered by competing vendors.  Some of the early PLC’s involved some very exotic variants such as programs that executed software in strict line-by-line form as part of the control system strategy to insure precise, repeatable execution.  Larger systems with 1000′s of I/O points simply relied on centralized execution and the controllers focused on increasing speed to manage system behavior.  The common metric was so many thousands of lines of code per millisecond of execution time.

Where does all this go when the cost has fallen to a $.50 chip of FPGA logic and an OEM editor that you can license for $5 a copy from one of the major suppliers of ladder editors?  As a marketing proposition, it’s hard to differentiate a highly technical production like a controller when there are 20 or 30 brand of mature products to choose from.  This is made more difficult when the system pricing varies from $300 to $3000 for what could be argued is the same thing.  If the assumptions about the commodity level product are correct, then where is all this headed.

When evaluating controls, the dominant cost is generally not the processor, it’s the I/O system.  There certain applications where there are specific I/O considerations such as platinum RTDs or specific alloy thermocouples which cannot be avoided.  In these cases, the supplier with the best product wins, pricing may be a secondary consideration.  With regard to general purpose I/O products, ac and dc discrete inputs and outputs, lowest cost combined with highest density will be the most effective. So if the system requirement is relatively simple, direct hardware cost will be a significant drive to best overall cost.  Where more complex I/O are required, careful examination of the specialty components will be the key differentiator.

Given the tendency of the market to gravitate to the lowest cost, the technology curve for machine control suggests that there are some very large bumps in the road ahead.  Let’s hope the “unseen hand” of the free market prevails and some really cool new control solutions break out into the real world.

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WRW Engineering helps companies integrate mechanical, electrical and software engineering into custom mechatronic solutions that achieve higher production efficiencies, faster time to market, and increased revenues.

The core of WRW is founded on BWG’s roots, building on its history of creative problem solving, engineering expertise, and extensive industry knowledge.

WRW’s multi-talented team is focused on the development of solutions and patents that can be applied to a wide range of problems, the creation of intuitive modular systems and tools, the provision of software hooks to facilitate interaction between proprietary software and the customer’s software, and engineering higher performance and lower costs through embedded intelligence.

To learn more about WRW Engineering, visit www.wrweng.com.

Bishop-Wisecarver Group
www.bwc.com

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The premise is that the rate of change in the industrial controls markets must accelerate or there is likely to be severe disruption within this economic activity.  This issue is important because, not just for the sake of the businesses engaged in this market, but because control technology is an enabling technology to everything else.  The $300 billion semiconductor market, which fuels almost everything, is the largest consumer of  motion control technology by percentage of any segment I know.  So I think this is a pretty big deal.

The industrial controls market moves slowly because of its history and because of the development processes that go into it’s products.  Industrial controls are inherently very high reliability systems due to the cost impact of failures.  Wrecking a boat of wafers could cost $250,000 or more depending on the complexity of the part and how far along in the manufacturing process the product is.  Dropping a cellphone call, while frustrating, is a lot less costly.

Life expectancy in the industrial controls arena is very different from consumer electronics.  Most consumer devices are obsolete in 2 to 3 years.  Most industrial devices are expected to last 10 to 20 years. The longer life cycles in the industrial arena are a function of return on investment.  To install the control system requires extensive labor and system costs that are not part of the consumer world.

Yet we find industrial applications being highly engaged by Windows based platforms, Microsoft programming conventions, wireless interfaces which replace the cost for hard wiring, and Ethernet communications.  Why?  Because the cost effectiveness of these technologies are compelling and implementation is getting cheaper as economies of scale and cumulative expertise increases.

Where does the industry go from here?  In the presence of a Raspberry Pi processor that costs $35. and runs Linux OS, the most stable system around, it’s going to become very difficult to justify paying thousands of dollars for the high end controls of the major vendors.  The introduction of $6. embedded processors combined with declining costs for power semiconductors will shrink the size and costs for control of electric motors.

The next generation of controls will come as the large suppliers embrace and drive the rate of change.  large controls vendors will probably acquire the technology of smaller, more innovative companies, or they will be disrupted out of the market as new solutions become more mainstream.

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The track record in the industrial community is quite different.  Major aspects of the consumer electronics industry pervade the industrial controls landscape.  Windows CE is the dominant OS for operator-to-machine interface devices.  Ethernet communications is by far the dominant communications layer between systems.  Internet access and Bluetooth networking is so pervasive that industrial controls vendors are making individual sensors “net aware” and writing applications for your mobile computing device to be able to connect at will.

Pretty amazing stuff.

Yet the mainstream of industrial control does not seem to be innovating at the same rate as consumer electronics.  Yet much of the industry is taking advantage of consumer componentry.  The whole notion of “Industrial Computers” would not exist without the massive volumes of Intel multicore processors, ARM 7, 9 & 11 processors, DSPs, etc.  Yet the controls industry isn’t seeing the same cost decline as consumers are seeing in their market space.

Not that there isn’t a declining cost, it’s just not happening at the same pace.  For which there might be some justifications.

Industrial products are required to meet more stringent testing.   If you look at the number agency approvals that are listed for products like Wago I/O, its incredible.  The cost for each test submittal is quite high and this leads to a huge cost burden for each component.  Testing for explosion proof performance and military grade shock and vibration rating is similarly expensive.  These are tests that consumer products are not required to meet.

On the other hand, reliability testing for consumer products is pretty grueling, just different.  If Apple is going to produce 200,000 a month of some new product, they want to avoid any potential for a recall.  My guess is more money might be spent on consumer product testing for different reasons, but it is amortized over many more units, so the impact is less noticeable.

Industrial control products use software applications that are highly focused and require complex testing.  Basically, software testing has roughly the same dynamics as hardware testing.

At the end of the day its about economies of scale and volume.  If the most successful I/O product in the entire industrial marketplace shipped 200,000 units a year, then the scale of the consumer market is 10 to 100 times larger than the industrial market.  So it should come as no surprise that consumer cellphones and tablets are making their way into the industrial control environment.

More on this next week.

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Lots of email this week about electric car and motorcycle speed records.  My apologies to the many who corrected my errors, I was probably looking at old information.  To be fair, there is a difference between speed records set at the Bonneville Salt Flats, speed records for the quarter mile, and competition racing speeds.  So if you have an update on any of the above, please feel free and send me an email so I can add it to our emails.

To start with the question was whether electric car or motorcycle racing could establish itself as genre like gasoline powered racing.  Judging from the response levels I would have to say, yes, there is a lot of interest.  It is going to compare in terms of loudness and flashiness?  Maybe not so much in the loud department, but definitely serious flash.

Maybe the high tech aspect attracts to a different crowd.  Certainly, the environmentally conscious will find racing without burning fuel appealing.  The challenge is getting the most power and control where you need it, and squeezing all the performance you can from a kilowatt of battery instead of a liter of fuel.

Among the many venues for electric car racing, one that really pushes the envelope is solar car racing.  Using only the light of the sun for power, converting that power into electricity and crossing the continent of Australia was the challenge years ago when I worked at Uniq Mobility and we supplied the early high performance, high efficiency brushless dc motor technology that powered those racers.

Nowadays college teams are designing more sophisticated racers that cross North America to show their skills.

All this effort is a collaboration between industry and education to drive (pun intended) the technology and gain wider acceptance for electric vehicles as a viable alternative to gasoline power.

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