As the automotive industry seeks to embrace electrification, part of the drive toward net-zero emissions targets and a future UK green economy, opportunities arise for development of sustainable and competitive UK supply chains for design, manufacture and recycling of zero-emission vehicles and their constituent components and systems. Through its innovation funding services such as the Automotive Transformation Fund (ATF), the UK government seeks to support these developments through accelerating business innovation and boosting R&D investment.

Realising the vision of zero-emission vehicles through electrification requires development of new Design-for-Manufacture processes and products across the UK automotive PEMD supply chain. This ATF proposal seeks to investigate an important aspect of this transformation, which currently is a gap in the UK supply chain: the feasibility of new processes for low-cost prototyping and small series production of e-motor lamination stacks.

In developing new e-motor products, a critical step is testing and validating designs using small batches of prototype assemblies. These assemblies must be representative of the final product in terms of fit, form, function, and particularly performance-relevant properties, accurately representing those achieved through final production processes. This is especially the case in automotive applications where the final product may well be part of a safety-critical vehicle system. On the other hand, automotive applications are highly cost-sensitive: hence, there is a need to minimize development costs whilst still achieving the required level of developmental rigour.

This project seeks to develop and test -- in conjunction with a real automotive e-motor development programme -- new processes that enable rapid, high-quality, low-cost manufacturing of prototype (or small volume production) samples of e-motor lamination stacks. The provision of the proposed new manufacturing processes will boost the UK PEMD supply chain and contribute to future sustainability -- for example by eliminating environmentally-harmful adhesives from stack assemblies and reducing manufacturing waste.

The proposed partnership includes ZF Automotive, a Tier-1 supplier of automotive systems, H V Wooding, a UK provider of product design, prototyping, assembly and testing services across a range of engineering areas, including lamination stacks for e-motor assemblies, and the Metrology group of the Centre for Manufacturing and Materials Engineering at Coventry University. The partnership brings together the manufacturing process capabilities, the metrology expertise for process and product tolerance analysis, and the end-user assembly and comprehensive testing expertise required to enable the new processes to be defined and fully characterised as part of a wider automotive e-motor development programme.