How a New Breed of Battery is Powering the World’s Most Technologically Advanced Motorsports
During the 2009 Formula One season, race teams began utilizing a game-changing new technology, KERS: the Kinetic Energy Recovery System. This environmentally-minded addition to the F1 arsenal spices up the sport for drivers (and fans) by offering cars an extra speed boost, making races more exciting and unpredictable than ever.
The addition of KERS was a win-win situation. Fans enjoyed more enthralling contests, with strategic bursts of velocity that created an unprecedented amount of opportunities for overtakes and nail-biting lead changes. Plus, the cars became less of an environmental nuisance thanks to the implementation of the battery packs that stored the energy collected by KERS, leading to a 35% reduction in fuel use.
Initially, these batteries stored only the kinetic energy generated when braking. Then in 2014, KERS lost its "K" but gained something else when it was supplanted by ERS, which also harvested the thermal (heat) energy that would otherwise be wasted.
This translates to a significant, 160 increase in brake horsepower for 30 seconds: so strategic use is vital. Each race team's technological mastery is also essential, as these power sources must be small, light, and thermally efficient. Tacking on a cooling system adds weight, which is a killer when first place is decided by fractions of a second. So the best batteries are capable of working efficiently at high temperatures.
A Winning Balance is Found
But our engineering team managed to leap-frog these conventional challenges while developing battery modules for a Silicon Valley-based luxury electric car producer whose technologies power the electrifying (no pun intended) Formula E racers.
The batteries themselves are a bit larger than your standard AA variety and their development required a great deal of advanced, proprietary science. But, thanks to untold technological legwork, they are now relatively straightforward to produce en masse. The more pressing engineering challenge? Efficiently linking them together and ensuring that the charge is drawn equally from many individual components in a pack—an especial challenge given the unforgiving conditions imposed by elite, world-class racers.
To achieve this gargantuan task, one of Beltim’s teams developed a series of panels, daisy-chaining thousands of batteries to produce a prodigious power pack that measures 5' x 3' x 5' and must be supported by an equally immense power cord, nearly half-a-foot in diameter.
Drawing on vast in-house experience, expertise, and attention to detail, we managed to achieve the tightest tolerances while working with demanding, finicky materials whose dimensions constantly fluctuated as they cooled or settled after various machining processes.
How? Through a meticulous, comprehensive, multi-faced effort utilizing numerous state-of-the-art analytical technologies. Including bore micrometers, coordinate-measuring machines (CMMs), and industry-leading statistical process control (SPC) to check, double-check, triple-check (and so on) that each component, at every stage of manufacture, adheres to the highest standards of quality and accuracy.
So when fractions of a thousandth of an inch separate success and failure, as they did for this project, Beltim can, and would love to, help you achieve unerring engineering precision. Discover the Beltim difference for yourself; get a free quote or contact us today!