Public Funding for Speira UK Limited

The partners will develop a winding machine for aluminium wires. The winding machine will be developed and provide the first UK supply chain solution for manufacturing aluminium coils. Coil winding is a critical component of eMachine manufacture and is not provided by any UK manufacturer. UK based companies of eMachines have to purchase winding machines from overseas suppliers or have wound coils shipped to them. The partners well placed to provide guidance on the work and how to exploit the results of the project. Two of the partners, Ashwoods and Voltalogic, provide copper coil designs that will be redesigned to use aluminium wire. Hydro will provide coated aluminium wire with the preferred electrical conductivity and mechanical properties. Aspire will build their work on winding machines to provide a volume manufacturing solution. WMG will leverage their development work on volume e-Machine manufacture to guide the partners to the provision of a volume manufacturing solution. The advantages of aluminium coils are lower cost and lower weight compared with copper. The major disadvantage is the higher resistance, which decreases the efficiency of the e-Machine at low speeds. With the drive to higher speed e-Machines this disadvantage is becoming lower. The designs developed by Ashwoods and Voltalogic will target designs optimised for use with aluminium windings. The flexibility of material properties allowed by Hydro material development will provide a wider set of winding solutions. The successful completion of the project will provide a UK supply chain for the manufacture of e-Machine coil winding. Through this, it will enhance the UK's competitiveness to deliver e-Machine manufacturing technology. It will embed the design and manufacturing expertise for coil winding into the UK supply chain. The project will develop the reduction in weight of e-Machines by 15% without compromising performance by developing manufacturing processes for winding coils from alternative material. The project will deliver, for the first time, to the off-highway market a single source drive systems incorporating advanced IPM motor technology, radically lighter BUT equally as efficient as current IPM technology. The consortium partners are Ashwoods Electric Motors, Aspire Engineering, Voltalogic, WMG and Hydro. The technology and manufacturing capability will be developed by Ashwoods, Voltalogic and Aspire. WMG will validate the coil windings whilst Ashwoods will integrate this new technology into their products for benchmark testing. Ashwoods will exploit the outputs of this project through their own existing high-volume OEM relationships by the end of 2020