Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - February 2021 - 17

TESTING FEATURE

" EV will be a growing business for us, with the 'E' coming
from a variety of sources. " - Brad Stamper, customer program manager

ALLISON TRANSMISSION

Attention to thermal control enables
temperatures in the huge chambers
to hold within ±2.5 degrees.
According to Jeanne Rues, Allison Transmissions'
veteran managing director of Engineering Services,
the voice of Allison engineers " helped planners identify needs and challenges in compressing product development times, getting products into vehicles sooner and being able to take vehicle-level results back
into the modeling-and-simulation space faster, " Rues
told SAE's Truck & Off-Highway Engineering. " Those
were keys to creating this facility. "
The VET's official launch in summer 2020 came with
news for the industry: Allison is expanding into testing
for external customers. It is devoting half the new facility's resources to this enterprise, the other half for internal programs. " The dividing line was put in place within
our business case for capitalizing this facility, " Stamper
noted. " We know there is Allison internal demand to
book 50 percent of the facility. And we need our partners
to be able to execute as quickly as we'll be able to execute. Our leadership quickly moved to make that capability available. That drove having two test cells here. "
TRUCK & OFF-HIGHWAY ENGINEERING

Robust measures are in place to keep the two parties separate. All
customers to the VET, internal and external, are considered proprietary with the same security safeguards. " Our customers' IP is paramount, " said David Proctor, facilities general manager. " The data we
collect goes directly to the cloud; only the customer has access to
that data storage. After 21 days, that data, which we provide in rawstate form, is erased. "

Swallowing a city bus
Allison Transmission partnered with AVL for the majority of the VET's
equipment, including dual-channel emissions-test systems and two
of the largest chassis dynos the Austrian company has ever built. The
dynos are calibrated to regenerate electric power back into the grid,
and their rollers can be moved 330 inches (838 cm) longitudinally in
their subfloor saddles to accommodate long vehicle wheelbases.
" We're also working to automate systems so that the whole building will 'tell us' what's wrong. It'll notify us in the future if we have an
issue, through our mobile phones, " Proctor said. " Currently, we get
the info on an HMI screen pinpointing where the problem is. "
February 2021 17

Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - February 2021

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