Month: October 2022

North East manufacturing – looking back and forward

Posted on by telliott

Advanced Electric Machines is proud to originate from and operate out of The North East of England. The North East is renowned for its rich history in manufacturing, and the region’s strong association with industry goes back many years. A whole host of prestigious companies set out their stall on the banks of the River Tyne and the River Wear, and these businesses had a reputation that spanned the entire globe. With this, the North East’s coal mining and shipyard industries became known far and wide across the world.

Stemming from as far back as the Middle Ages, the mining of coal allowed the North East to take advantage of the significant amount of iron that was found in the region to manufacture a variety of products, including anchors and tools. The Industrial Revolution laid the foundation for the area to become a hub of industry, with the worldwide demand for coal a driving force of innovation.

Such innovation was critical in the success of the region’s shipbuilding industry. Early shipbuilding achievements included building vessels for the King’s fleet in the 1200s, but the North East would eventually become the primary manufacturer of ships in Britain, which was itself the world’s largest producer of ships at the time.

Fast forward to the modern age, and while the coal mining and shipbuilding industries are no longer open for business, their memory evokes a sense of local pride. Mike O’Neill, Chief Operating Officer at Advanced Electric Machines, speaks particularly fondly of the North East’s manufacturing heritage.

Mike’s own family has a deep connection to the region’s manufacturing past. His grandfather and father worked on the area’s famous shipyards for William Doxford & Sons, where he helped to build ship engines that would be sold around the world. Mike’s mother also worked in manufacturing in the North East, making deflection coils that would be used in contemporary televisions for Philips Components. It should come as no surprise, then, that Mike would go on to help lead Advanced Electric Machines’ efforts to supply sustainable electric motors across the globe.

The path that Mike has taken, in having a pivotal role in the first five years of Advanced Electric Machines’ journey, has come from his “passion to establish a North East homegrown manufacturing business and put it on the map.”

This passion has been inspired by some of the North East’s most innovative industrialists – Mike is even able to reel off a list of the names of local manufacturing icons, such as George Stephenson (who built the first locomotive to haul coal in 1814), Joseph Swann (who developed the first incandescent light bulbs to illuminate homes and public buildings in 1881), and William Armstrong (a renowned visionary inventor and engineer who built the world’s first home to be powered by hydroelectricity in 1869).

Does the current manufacturing landscape live up to what the past had to offer in the North East? In Mike’s eyes, the innovation of the region is getting stronger all the time, with continuous investment facilitating a greater offering. One such example is car manufacturer Nissan, which is demonstrating its confidence in the North East by investing in its European manufacturing facility in Sunderland. This has brought tier one automotive suppliers to the region to supply Nissan, which has and created a hub of supporting businesses that have become a huge source of employment to the region.

Perhaps all that is missing in the North East right now are large homegrown manufacturers. While there is an abundance of smaller homegrown businesses, the bigger manufacturers in the region are predominantly established elsewhere in the world. Mike’s ambition is for Advanced Electric Machines to fill the void and employ people that are local to the area.

Advanced Electric Machines is determined to contribute back to the North East. Mike commented: “Although we’re manufacturing new innovative products with new technology, we don’t just want to look after our own business; we want to do everything we can to share the success of Advanced Electric Machines with the community. We want to serve as a local employer with local employees that are more than just a number, as was the case with the working communities established by our iconic manufacturing predecessors.”

As for what the future holds, the North East is certainly in a good place. Local councils have been investing heavily to support business development and new infrastructure, which will nurture local innovation, as well as attract existing businesses to the region. Automotive electrification in particular seems to have developed the manufacturing landscape in the area, with Advanced Electric Machines one of several local businesses pushing for greater sustainability. Mike’s belief is that, “the combined strength of automotive manufacturers of all kinds will stand the North East in good stead to continue to be a hugely successful manufacturing region.”

What is the true scale of electrification? 

Posted on by telliott

By now, it would have been nigh on impossible to have avoided discussion about automotive electrification. High on the list of priorities of governments, industry, and various climate scientists across the globe, the electric vehicle dialogue has intensified over the years. 

Much of this dialogue centres around passenger cars, trucks and vans.  

With the prominent role that these vehicles play in the everyday lives of most people, this seems reasonable. And yet, there are so many other types of vehicle that get overlooked when we talk about electrification. These vehicles, much like passenger cars, are integral to society, as well as the economy. 

One such example is the bus. Renowned for getting a wide cross-section of the general public from A to B, these vehicles make up an important part of the electrification landscape. According to a statistical release published in October 2020 by the United Kingdom’s Department for Transport, local bus services travelled a total of 1.13 billion miles in the year ending March 2020. If left unelectrified, the carbon footprint of these vehicles will remain substantial. In 2020, despite the pandemic significantly reducing travel, the emissions from UK buses was still 2.2 million metric tonnes, which is enough to fill 440,000 hot air balloons. 

In many places across the world, including in the UK, this is a problem that is being tackled. In Indonesia, for example, PT INKA, a state-owned rolling stock and automotive manufacturer, has collaborated with Advanced Electric Machines to manufacture  electrified buses. These buses will contain our sustainable electric motor technology and will be crucial to meeting the Indonesian government’s commitment to electrifying its fleet of public transportation buses by 2030.

Also overlooked are off-highway vehicles. Used on steep or uneven ground, off-highway vehicles are used in the construction and agricultural sectors, including everything from mining vehicles and tractors to mobile platforms and cranes. Consider the fuel required for one bulldozer to function on a construction site for one day’s work. Powering this vehicle with an internal combustion engine goes against the sustainable practices that the imminent bans of petrol and diesel passenger cars the world is striving towards. 

In our work with SCG International, we have been working alongside the cement and building material provider to make a difference in Thailand’s construction industry. Advanced Electric Machines and SCG recently signed a memorandum of understanding to develop innovative solutions for SCG’s next generation of zero-emissions mixing and transportation machinery. In this capacity, we will integrate our unique electric motors into SCG’s forward-thinking product range. 

Our ambition to achieve greater sustainability in the transport sector has not stopped there, either. We have identified road trains as another vehicle type that has been neglected in the approach towards electrification. Particularly prominent in Australia, these vehicles undertake extremely long journeys to transport goods overland to remote areas.  

Qube Logistics is an Australian provider of import and export logistics services, operating long-distance road trains. In partnership with Adgero, Advanced Electric Machines’ sustainable technology is helping the company to boost the capacity and efficiency of its trains and minimise its running costs. Qube’s new sustainable e-axle solution will utilise our HDSRM300T drive system, with each axle fitted with two rare-earth free motors and a transmission. 

As you can see, there’s more to automotive electrification than merely passenger cars, trucks and vans. Research undertaken by the International Energy Agency has predicted that there will be 145 million of these types of vehicles electrified and on the road by 2030. But this 145 million doesn’t even remotely take vehicles used for construction, in agriculture, for public transport, and for various other means into account. It is clear that the scale of electrification is more than meets the eye, and it remains our goal here at Advanced Electric Machines to make sure that this process occurs in a sustainable manner. 

Why the North East is pioneering the next generation of electric vehicles

Posted on by telliott

The electric revolution is already in full swing. Last year, 450,000 electric and hybrid vehicles were registered in the UK–that’s 1 in 4 of all new cars and vans. Meanwhile some experts predict there will be 20 million electrified vehicles on global roads by 2025.

Of all areas of the UK, it is surely the North East of England that is already benefitting most from this global move towards electrification. Aided by the introduction of the Nissan Leaf–arguably the world’s first mass-market EV–which entered production at the company’s Sunderland facility in 2010, the region now boasts burgeoning electric vehicle expertise.

At the same time that Nissan began production of the Leaf more than a decade ago, it also opened a local facility to produce the vehicle’s battery cells. This spawned smaller companies that both supplied and fed off Nissan’s plant–such as Sunderland-based Hyperdrive, which repackaged the plant’s battery cells into bespoke applications.

Back in 2010 it was hard to imagine that the electric vehicle industry would grow up in the way that it has, and that the North East would become such a relevant part of its future. As well as the gravitational pull of Nissan’s electrification programme, this was also thanks to several academic and industry initiatives.

To begin with, Newcastle University boasts the UK’s largest academic research group in Electrical Power. It was within this group, and as faculty at the university, that our own founders Dr James Widmer and Dr Andy Steven first pioneered the technology that sets Advanced Electric Machines apart today.

The academic might of the region also meant that when the Advanced Propulsion Centre was looking to set up an electric machines hub to drive UK development of EV motor technology in 2016, Newcastle University was the obvious choice.

This was followed in 2019 by the foundation of the Driving the Electric Revolution Industrialisation Centre, which brings together world class capability in power electronics, machines and driver (PEMD).

All of this combined creates a fascinating hotbed of innovation, which puts the North East in a great position to capitalise on the next generation of electric vehicles. As demand grows, tomorrow’s electric vehicles need to be more efficient and less costly to produce, while also cleaning up a problematic and volatile supply chain.

We’re already seeing North East-based companies rising to the challenge. There’s Advanced Electric Machines of course, with our plans to make the world’s EV motors truly sustainable from our Newcastle headquarters, but there is also Turntide, which occupies what was once Hyperdrive’s facility. Meanwhile, the North East will boast not one but two Gigafactories thanks to investment by BritishVolt and Envision,(the latter now owns Nissan’s Sunderland battery plant). And this is just the start–as these companies thrive, more will follow to feed from and feed into the region’s success.

We’ve come a long way since Nissan started production of the Nissan Leaf in Sunderland, and the prospects for local companies involved in the electric revolution look brighter than ever.