UTAC CERAM Millbrook recently unveiled the successor to its Variable Temperature Emissions Chamber (VTEC). VTEC 2 is so much more than that, though, as Peter Jackson found out
Millbrook is a name synonymous with vehicle testing. Whether it’s the high-speed bowl that first comes to mind, the flowing alpine test track or the merciless Belgian Pavé – all of which have made TV appearances on the likes of Top Gear – the Bedford-based Proving Ground has it all. The facility is even transformed into a film set on occasion – James Bond’s Aston Martin DBS was famously rolled over at Millbrook in a spectacular scene from Casino Royale, released in 2006.
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Small and big screen appearances aside, the day-to-day testing work is rather interesting too. Many of the UK market’s favourite coaches and buses have been tested and developed at the facility, with everything from performance through to noise levels and efficiency evaluated on site. In recent years, retrofit manufacturers have even used Millbrook Proving Ground to develop their systems to Euro VI compliance.
Recently, Millbrook – which first opened its doors in 1970 – announced its merger with French vehicle testing giant UTAC CERAM, making it the largest vehicle testing organisation in Europe. Explained Laurent Benoit, UTAC CERAM’s CEO: “What we wanted with this merger was to be a leading international group in the field of testing, type approval and certification, as well as new technologies like autonomous and connected vehicles. Once our Moroccan facility opens, we will have nine test centres around the world, in France, the UK, Finland, Morocco and the US, and 1,300 employees.”
All of this is very impressive, but how will UTAC CERAM Millbrook cater for the changing testing demands posed by electric and hydrogen vehicles as they become more and more mainstream in the coming years? VTEC 2 is the answer. Standing for Variable Temperature Emissions Chamber, the first iteration of VTEC was opened at the Bedford site back in 1996, so was due an upgrade.
Fortunately, UTAC CERAM Millbrook anticipated the swift rise in demand for zero-emissions vehicles, and designed the new building with electric and hydrogen propulsion firmly in mind.
I spoke to John Proctor, Technical Director for UK Test Services at UTAC CERAM Millbrook, to find out more about the new facility and what it can do.
CBW: How long have you been testing coaches and buses?
JP: The old facility, VTEC 1, was built in 1996, so we’ve been lab testing coaches and buses for 25 years now. We’ve been testing them on our tracks for longer than that, which we continue to do to this day both in the UK and France.
To give you an impression of the number of tests we do, in VTEC 1 we’ve done over 19,500 tests – and a substantial amount of those have been bus and coach. We also test trucks, larger military vehicles and agricultural vehicles in the facility – it’s designed purely for heavy duty commercial vehicles.
The original facility of course was designed to meet 1996 standards and used 1996 technology, and since then everything has changed; technology has moved on, emissions and fuel economy have improved drastically, so the testing environment has moved on a lot too – the requirements for a facility are very different today.
VTEC 1 was a two-wheel-drive facility, and nowadays more and more vehicles are four-wheel-drive, so we needed a four-wheel-drive facility to give more repeatable and accurate representations of how the vehicles are actually driven in the real world, especially when it comes to hybrid vehicles with energy regeneration systems that work on all four wheels.
Also, when you look at the emissions standards that were being tested to in 1996, by comparison we’re now testing much lower emission levels, much smaller concentrations. So we’ve upgraded to the latest emissions analyser systems, which are able to run infinite-length cycles – previously the longest cycles we could run were around 55 minutes. Now we have what’s called a carousel system, we can go for eight hours at a time measuring emissions, fuel economy and range all the way through that period.
We’re using the latest analyser technology, which has been in place for lighter duty testing for the last couple of years. We’re looking at particulate number and mass, N2O and CO2, the really critical emissions for clean air. We can also measure fuel consumption very accurately, so we can understand the ‘global warming’ effect of a vehicle fully.
In addition to that, we’ve made our climactic envelope more stable, so we can more accurately control the ambient condition in which the vehicle is tested in the chamber. Now we’ve also got the ability to alter humidity as well. Having accurate temperature and humidity control allows us to replicate the conditions the vehicle is likely to operate in around the world, and it allows the results to be much more tightly controlled as well.
CBW: Presumably this will be very useful for retrofit manufacturers as well as OEMs?
JP: We can go out with the retrofit manufacturer and collect data in the real world, and take that back to the lab and replay it in a very repeatable fashion. In the real world, you’ll never get exactly the same road conditions on two different days – the traffic and the weather will be different – but in VTEC we can replicate the exact same driving conditions over and over again.
Taking it a step further, we can then change the ambient condition as well to replicate the same duty cycle but on a cold day in winter or a hot day in summer, demonstrating what effect it will have on the emissions and fuel economy and the systems on the bus.
One of the big things we help customers with is developing the systems for emissions control, engine control and general vehicle control in varying conditions. When the vehicle’s HVAC system is working on a hot day for example, we can understand what effect that has on the fuel economy and range as well.
In addition, the new facility enables us to test heavier and larger vehicles than we could previously. We’ve also got a system in place now that allows us to test tri-axle buses and coaches; the floor can move away, allowing both rear axles to sit on a rolling road. All of these enhancements really are aimed at ensuring VTEC 2 represents the real world as accurately as possible.
CBW: I imagine this can save manufacturers a lot of time during the development of a new or vehicle?
JP: The replication of drive cycles, various ambient conditions and load cases – if the bus is laden or unladen – can really help the manufacturer optimise the vehicle’s performance for a given condition, and helps them resolve issues that come up during the development.
Quite often, especially with highly complex and integrated powertrain systems, an issue can happen in a very particular scenario. Replicating that in the real world can be very difficult and time consuming, so having a controlled environment to test and replicate that condition enables manufacturers to investigate the cause of the problem, and then prove that their solution has fixed it.
That’s another significant area of work that customers do with us, as it allows them to rectify issues much more quickly than they could with real-world testing.
CBW: What makes the facility hydrogen ready?
JP: If you get an escape of hydrogen, it rises very quickly and has a tendency to go wherever it wants, so you effectively have to have a sealed chamber. So, not only is VTEC 2 a sealed chamber, it has a particularly-shaped roof that’s designed to collect the hydrogen, where it can be detected and then extracted safely using a special ventilation system.
Most of the ‘hydrogen-ready’ features are more related to safety, with worst-case scenarios in mind. Ideally, nothing happens and the bus just comes in and does what it needs to do and goes out again, and then you really wouldn’t notice the hydrogen safety systems. But we have to make it ready for the worst-case scenarios.
CBW: What else can VTEC be used for besides powertrain development?
JP: We have seen other use cases for the bus and coach market, mostly related to the onboard ‘comfort systems’ – the HVAC system, demist, cold start operation, bus warm-up – which is particularly tricky for an electric bus.
Traditionally, you’d warm the bus up using the engine coolant; you’ve got a thermal response from just driving the bus around, which can then warm up the passenger compartment. With an electric vehicle, your heat output is much lower as you don’t have an engine to warm the cabin up, so there are new systems being developed to address this.
We think we get cold weather in the UK, but some buses have to work in much lower temperatures, so these systems are aimed more at vehicles working in extreme weather, where keeping the vehicle warm is a key focus for manufacturers.
We can test these systems inside VTEC 2, replicating a full duty cycle. Beginning with the driver starting the bus first thing in the morning for the early shift, we then simulate the vehicle heading to its first pick-up of the day, by which time the HVAC system has begun warming the passenger compartment.
From that point on, we can increase and decrease the load on the bus to simulate passengers boarding and disembarking, repeating the process until the bus reaches the end of its route and is recharged or refuelled. We can simulate an entire day’s running to understand how all the systems on the bus perform – even the squat systems used at stops.
Some of the more interesting ones for the coach world include the testing of things like people plugging their phones or laptops into the onboard USB charging points. That places an additional electrical demand on the vehicle, and we can simulate it fluctuating throughout the day to see what effect it might have on fuel economy and range.
CBW: How do you simulate varying passenger loadings in VTEC 2?
JP: The dyno we have is able to increase the load on the vehicle, which simulates the additional weight of passengers boarding. Effectively, we apply additional ‘drag’ to the bus through the rollers, so that the bus has to work harder to accelerate.
This allows us to mimic full loading conditions, ranging from completely unladen to fully laden, in incremental steps – we can simulate the boarding of individual passengers using the advanced dyno system in VTEC 2.
Another benefit this system brings is in determining the effects of weight reduction. If a manufacturer is considering shedding weight from a vehicle, we can test what benefits they’ll see in terms of range and emissions. Using the dyno again, we can reduce the load on the bus to simulate a weight saving, even though the vehicle’s actual weight is unchanged.
The manufacturer can then say, ‘to achieve this benefit in range, we need to remove 75kg from the vehicle,’ for example. It informs their design and development decisions, and allows them to plan ahead.
CBW: Is demand for testing still increasing? As it’s become much more important over the last 20 years or so with the emergence of Euro emissions standards.
JP: Yes, to answer directly. We’re still seeing high levels of demand for emissions testing, including retrofit systems and new models trying to comply with the latest emissions regulations, but we’re also seeing new technologies grow in popularity: hybrid, EV and even hydrogen. They offer huge benefits in terms of emissions, but they are complex systems and they’re relatively new, so the testing requirements to develop and validate those products – and allow the manufacturer to put them onto the market with a degree of confidence that they’re going to work the way they should do – really are quite intensive.
We’re seeing testing increase more so for those new technologies. There is still a requirement to test diesel vehicles to make sure they’re compliant with emission regulations, but we’re seeing the demand really increase for the new technologies.
Hybrid and EV buses have become much more popular in the last couple of years, and we’re seeing a lot more interest in hydrogen fuel cell vehicles too. That’s why we made this facility ‘hydrogen-ready.’ We anticipated the rise in popularity of hydrogen at the time we designed VTEC 2, the best part of two years ago – that’s how long these things take to get off the ground and get built. I’ll be honest, we probably weren’t expecting the spike in demand to happen quite this soon, but the new facility has arrived at just the right time.
CBW: How do you see the demand for different types of testing changing in future?
JP: I think there’s going to be a lot more work around hydrogen and electric vehicles – we’re at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to zero-emission vehicles at the moment. I think that’s going to dominate technology development over the next few years, and off the back of that will be lightweight vehicles as well.
I think manufacturers will be focusing on making chassis and bodies as light as possible, as it benefits energy consumption and range. From a testing point of view, we will need to understand the effect of removing weight from the vehicle on range, emissions and so on.
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