Nissan denies any UK ‘sweetheart deals’

NISSAN Motor Company has denied the presence of any ‘sweetheart’ deals associated with its latest plan to expand production and create fresh jobs in the UK.

Grob wins big at BMW's Hams Hall

Grob-Werke of Mindelheim, Germany has been one of the big machine tool winners of the heavy investment BMW has made to develop its Hams Hall engine plant near Birmingham.

JLR to open 300,000/y car plant on Slovakia

JaguarLandRover (JLR) is to build a new manufacturing plant in the city of Nitra in western Slovakia to build aluminium-intensive vehicles from 2018 onwards.

BMW makes three-cylinder engines in UK

The first plug-in hybrid sports car from BMW is powered by three-cylinder engines exclusively produced at BMW's Hams Hall engine plant, near Birmingham.

And, Grob-Werke GmbH of Mindelheim, one of Germany’s leading automotive equipment suppliers has been instrumental in supplying machine tools for this benchmark facility.  

Cummins feels the Scorpion’s sting

Executives at Cummins Inc. must have known it would happen. Now it has. Ford has dumped Cummins in its medium-duty trucks in favour of its own diesel, as revealed this week at the Work Truck Show in Indianapolis, Indiana.

The new F-650/F-750 trucks are the latest Ford commercial trucks to have a revamp. And they will have the second-generation 6.7-litre Power Stroke V8 diesel engine built at the company’s Chihuahua Engine Plant, Mexico, and which during development carried the code name Scorpion.

Challenges ahead for Stadler

When Wolfgang Stadler arrives at JaguarLandRover to begin work full time for his new employer he will find much with which to familiarise himself.

Recently, JaguarLandRover (JLR) appointed Wolfgang Stadler its new director of manufacturing. Stadler will be responsible for JLR’s global manufacturing operations and will report directly to Dr Ralf Speth, chief executive officer.

Stadler will join the company from BMW Group where he has held the position of senior vice president, BMW Plant Dingolfing. Prior to this he has held a number of senior positions at BMW Group internationally, including the post of managing director, BMW South Africa.

‘Cut and paste’ Hotfire engine plant for JLR

The secret plant for JaguarLandRover’s next-generation Hotfire engine, now in the early stages of construction adjacent to the M54 in Wolverhampton, will effectively be a ‘cut and paste’ job of an existing UK engine facility.

The implications of this will be revealed in the nature of the machine tools and other manufacturing equipment, most of which will be sourced from Germany.

In today’s computer-generated industrial world, it almost becomes second-nature to ‘cut & paste’ individual machining cells and other process equipment to create a manufacturing hinterland. Cells for the five-Cs – cylinder heads, cylinder blocks, crankshafts, camshafts and con-rods – are all well defined in machine tool vendors’ CAD goody boxes; though today camshafts and con-rods will likely come direct from component suppliers.

It is most likely, in this respect that the £355 million Hotfire engine facility due to come on-stream in 2014 could bear a close similarity to various aspects of Ford’s Bridgend Engine Plant (BEP) - or indeed various individual aspects of other engine plants in Europe or the US. Earlier this year Ford announced plans to boost output at the South Wales plant of its 1.6-litre EcoBoost four-cylinder engine. The move effectively will triple the production of vehicles with EcoBoost engines to 480,000 a year by 2015 up from 141,000 in 2011.

Ford Ecoboost engine set for CGI block?

Speculation amongst some observers suggests there would be no surprise if the “sensational” engine using compacted graphite iron (CGI) block, due to bow in the 2013/2014 time frame (see last post), comes from Ford Motor Company; the engine lying within the company’s Ecoboost family.

Speculation is ignited through the announcement 29 October by global foundry Tupy SA of Joinville, Brazil, that it has placed a contract against SinterCast for its System 3000plus process control technology to use for the production of 300,000-plus high-quality CGI castings a year.

Industry insiders suggest the projected annual volume of over 300,000 a year of the new CGI blocks from Tupy SA is too high for a vee-diesel production run. This implies either an in-line diesel or a gasoline engine.

IF the new application is for a gasoline engine, the block could be in-line or vee configuration. For an in-line engine, Ford is one speculated OEM customer to take such high volumes.

But, on the other hand, IF the new CGI block is intended for a vee gasoline engine, then General Motors could be the customer. However, GM has no previous experience of machining CGI on such a massive scale. And over 300,000 blocks a year is ‘big scale’. All IFs and BUTs.

The EcoBoost is a family of direct-injected gasoline engines developed by Ford in association with FEV Engineering. They range from the three-cylinder I-3 of 100-123bhp, through the 1.6-litre I-4, the 2-litre I-4 and up to the 3.5-litre V6 giving 350bhp.

The speculation would fit in with suggestions (in the previous post) that the cylinder block of the upcoming engine is an I4 of around 1.6 to 2-litres and not a vee diesel engine configuration. Indeed the idea could be taken a stage further – the engine could be an I-3 three-cylinder 1.6-litre or an I-4 four-cylinder 2.2-litre gasoline engine.

The benefits of CGI have now become well established and well-proven through the efforts of numerous OEMs, with Audi and Ford leading the pack in passenger vehicle applications: lighter weight, higher strength, higher stiffness, and improved rigidity and NVH. In theory, a CGI block can be as light as an aluminium block and would be of great advantage in the Ford Focus or light duty truck use in the US.

CGI would assist with Ford’s programme of down-sizing whilst retaining improved performance and fuel economy. For example, a 2.2-litre I4 gasoline engine with a performance of 125bhp/litre could deliver 257bhp and 300ftlb torque. With 150bhp/litre this would give 330bhp. Eventually, around 380bhp might be possible with 2-litres being seen as a possible company in-line capacity limit in years to come.

In the absence of mature information at this stage, speculation further fuels the nature of the upcoming engine family. For example, it is known that Ford has carried out work over the years on HCCI (Homogeneous Charge Ignition Engines) in partnership with PSA in France on the 2.7-litre V6 engine with a CGI block. Both companies have experience of machining CGI cylinder blocks. Could HCCI be a step too far for Ford at this stage?

In an HCCI engine, fuel and air are mixed and injected into the cylinder. The piston compresses the mixture and spontaneous combustion occurs. (In HCCI, the engine combines the fuel and air pre-mixing of a spark ignition engine with the instantaneous combustion of a diesel engine.)

Ford also has supported HCCI research through Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and oil giant BP. Ford executives believe an HCCI engine can give near-diesel engine fuel efficiency but with the lower cost of the gasoline engine. However, to be successful, the conventional gasoline cylinder block must be strengthened and this is where a CGI block could be of advantage.

Ford is not alone. General Motors too has tested HCCI in Aura and Vectra mid-sized cars. But GM has not machined CGI blocks before in production-environment volumes. It has yet to introduce its own CGI engine, though GM Europe, must have ‘looked over the shoulder’ of VM Motori in Italy with its vee diesel. GM has plans for a CGI V8 diesel but they are believed to be still on the back burner.

Another variation is GDCI or Gasoline Direct-Injection Compression Ignition where low emissions are combined with high efficiency. In 2010, Delphi Corporation with Hyundai America Technical Center and academics from Wisconsin University won a US$7.48 million grant from the US Department of Energy to develop a GDCI engine; details were presented at the 2012 SAE World Congress in Detroit.

In GDCI, air is compressed in the cylinder before partially pre-mixed fuel is injected into the cylinder. As air is compressed, the heat generated is sufficient to ignite the mixture without need for a spark plug.

GDCI differs from HCCI in that with the latter, air and fuel are mixed before compression begins. Compression of the air/fuel mixture causes self-ignition, rather than introducing air/fuel into the hot compressed air at or near top dead centre, as with GDCI. GDCI would benefit also from a CGI block.

Among those working on advanced powertrain systems in the UK is CAFDR, the Centre for Advanced Powertrains and Fuels Research at Brunel University, Uxbridge. Sponsoring companies include Ford Motor Company and Delphi Diesel Systems.

Global machine tool supplier MAG IAS LLC of Erlanger, Kentucky, is probably the pack-leader in terms of most experience of developing and supplying machining centres for CGI, though Grob-Werke GmbH of Mindelheim, Germany cannot be discounted through its association with Audi. This year, Grob-Werke opened a production base in Liaoning, China – its fourth. MAG claims to have successfully used cryogenics to machine CGI, and has supplied Ford with machine tools for its latest V8 diesel engine lines in Chihuahua, Mexico. The Chihuahua Engine Plant (CEP) makes engines for Ford’s F-series trucks. These vee engines use CGI blocks from Tupy SA.

Specialist CGI foundry Tupy plans to supply the 300,000-plus CGI cylinder blocks from its newly-equipped foundry in Saltillo, Mexico.

Meanwhile, back to square one – all IFs and BUTs. But whatever, this will prove to be a “landmark” CGI engine application – the biggest-ever single order for such a prominent and vital engine component.            ∎