How Precision Engineering Is Helping the Rising Electric Vehicle Industry
Unless you’ve been avoiding the news in recent years, you’ll be aware of the two major challenges facing modern society: dwindling natural resources and climate change. Finding sustainable solutions are no longer a luxury, but an urgent necessity.
The automotive industry is a sector where rapid change is crucial. Like with other areas of technology and design, it’s imperative that all parts are created exactly. Precision engineering, and particularly computer numerical control (CNC), is playing a vital role in making our planet more sustainable for the future.
The Sustainable Revolution
In recent years, an urgency has been gathering pace in political, social and cultural life to change the way we live, produce our energy and manufacture the products we use in our everyday lives. Going green is no longer seen as a trendy stance for those with the money and leisure to pursue it – the Sustainable Revolution is here to stay.
It’s not just activists like Sir David Attenborough and Greta Thunberg who are helping to make a difference. The Sustainable Revolution is inspiring everyone from multinationals making their operations greener, to individuals fixing solar panels to their roofs. World leaders are realising that they need to implement ecologically friendly policies.
CEOs and Directors in many cases share these concerns and want to use their positions to contribute to saving the planet. On the other hand, commercial pressures are also growing on businesses to develop corporate sustainability practices and green credentials.
Consumers across the world are becoming more ethically conscious and their buying behaviour is often influenced by how sustainable companies operate, produce and distribute their goods. While the UK government has adopted a Net Zero Strategy, which includes considering tenders for public contracts from companies with similar strategies in place.
Energy companies are trying to move from relying on fossil fuels, which use up natural resources and produce large amounts of greenhouse gasses, to clean energy, such as wind, solar and tidal.
Whereas the automotive industry, has begun to move from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles. However, this comes with significant challenges.
The Role of Precision Engineering in the Sustainable Revolution
David Billington, Executive Director at Euspen;
“In all industrial revolutions throughout history, it has been precision engineering that has driven success, turning seemingly impossible ideas into cost-effectively produced products and components. It is our view that when it comes to sustainable energy, the same pattern will develop.”
Of all the industrial revolutions David Billington refers to, the current Sustainable Revolution is the fastest moving — arguably even faster than the digital revolution. This makes it essential not only to be able to produce new products quickly and with extreme accuracy, but also to be able to reverse engineer solutions, allowing engineers to test their most innovative designs and pinpoint and correct potential issues from the outset.
This means that precision engineering can deliver four key ingredients of the technology required for the Sustainable Revolution to move forward at full pace:
- Innovation — The requirements of sustainable industry are changing all the time. Using precision engineering allows engineers to come up with new or adapted solutions quickly.
- Reliability — One of the common requirements of the energy and automotive industries is the need for the technology to work reliably. This can be challenging, but precision engineering can provide components that will last.
- Accuracy — Many of the parts used in sustainable technology are extremely intricate. They have to be produced with a degree of accuracy far greater than traditional technology, and precision engineering makes this possible.
- Mass production — Time is ticking for the Earth, so sustainable solutions need to spread across the world at high speed. Precision engineering, and especially CNC engineering, enable manufacturers to mass-produce components fast and accurately.
CNC Engineering
Until the 1960s, the only way of ensuring precision engineering in manufacturing was under constant human supervision. In fact, the technology goes all the way back to ancient Egypt, in the form of the lathe, but far more accurate milling and turning became possible with 20th century advances.
In the 1960s, the development of CNC engineering allowed accuracy in milling to be monitored to a level that wouldn’t have been possible previously. As, unlike a human, a computer can react instantly to highly complex geometries.
CNC engineering has become the standard in all industries that require high degrees of accuracy in milling components, as well as making new industries possible. Much of the green technology we’re now coming to rely on wouldn’t be possible without the extreme accuracy provided by CNC. Even traditional precision engineering wouldn’t be able to produce components to the same level of accuracy.
Precision Engineering in the Automotive Industry
The automotive industry has always required precise engineering. The introduction of CNC has transformed the industry to achieve the precision needed from the engine and gearbox, to the interior panels and lighting, and the axles.
On the face of it, an electric vehicle is simpler in design than one based on an internal combustion engine. The need to efficiently convert chemical energy to mechanical advantage and linear force to rotational force through the transmission, requires many parts, mostly metal.
An electric vehicle, on the other hand, is relatively straightforward, consisting only of the battery, the electric motor and the transmission. Yet the engineering needs to be much higher in quality for an electric vehicle, for several reasons:
- Durability — The electrical components of an electric vehicle are long-lasting, so the machined parts need to equal them.
- Weight — Components for electrical vehicles need to be considerably more lightweight than for traditional vehicles, and this poses several engineering challenges.
- Noise reduction — Low noise is one of the selling points for electric vehicles, which makes it vital that no poorly machined parts are creating excess noise inside.
Precision engineering, augmented by CNC, can solve all these issues.
F-Tech Provides the Precision Engineering You Need
If you’re part of the solution in the Sustainable Revolution, providing components for green energy technology or for electric vehicles, you need the speed and accuracy of products that can only be achieved through precision engineering that is augmented by CNC.
This means you need the finest CNC milling, CNC turning and CNC surface finishing solutions, as well as a range of other resources. Here at F-Tech, we can help you achieve all of these, so get in touch with us — or browse our website for more information about our services.
