New Facility Updates
SBE Inc. has recently won a matching grant of $9.1 million as the major piece of funding for an $18 million project under the U.S. Department of Energy’s Electrical Drive Vehicle Battery and Component Manufacturing Initiative, part of President Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, to expand its electric car technology manufacturing. The manufacturing facility, dedicated to the transportation market, will be located in Barre, Vermont at the Wilson Industrial Park and will have capacity to produce Power Ring capacitors for over 100,000 plug-in hybrid and electric drive vehicles within 3 years. Such capacity will complement capacity at its current facility. SBE broke ground in April 2010 and expects to move in to the facility in November 2010.
1.2 Million Unit-hours Reached in Power Ring Life-Testing!
June 4, 2010 by SBE team
As part of the SBIR Phase II research grant, SBE is now testing 672 capacitors, with the purpose establish the reliability of SBE’s Power Ring capacitors. We are currently at 1.2 million unit-hours and are still going! The target is two million unit-hours. The actual end-results will be available in August 2010. We expect that the end result will be a 1000μF capacitor, able to handle 100+Arms ripple current, and using 105°C Coolant, with 10-year reliability.
The capacitors are tested in three batch ovens, 224 by oven. These ovens have been custom designed for maximum temperature uniformity. Each oven contains a rack specially designed not only to hold the capacitors during the lifetest, but also for production curing. They will be used at our current facility to cure the film winding sections of the Power Rings as we ramp up production. They will be then moved to our new facility.
Currently the three ovens are operating at different levels of temperature and applied. The selections have been chosen to create a reliability matrix whereby a designer can pick a voltage, current, and power duty cycle, and then select the appropriate Power Ring to operate reliably for a given coolant temperature up to and including 105°C. Outside the ovens are control modules, allowing us to monitor all of the capacitors’ temperatures and the constant health of each capacitor individually.
The temperature of each oven is monitored by a grid of eight thermocouples. These thermocouples read the temperature every 15 seconds and these are recorded into a spreadsheet, along with a time stamp as an ongoing log of the test.
Read more on our 105°C Coolant DC Capacitor Research.
SBE Featured in Joe Biden’s Chief Economist Blog
April 30, 2010 by SBE team
Jared Bernstein, Chief Economist and Economic Policy Adviser to Vice President Joseph Biden featured SBE in his blog yesterday. Nice!
See article at:
Recovery Act in Action – In the Right Place at the Right Time
Video: Ground-breaking of New Manufacturing Facility
April 29, 2010 by SBE team
SBE officially broke ground on its new high‐volume manufacturing facility on Saturday, April 17th. Special Guests included: Governor Jim Douglas, Lieutenant Governor Brian Dubie, Representative Peter Welch and US Assistant Secretary of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Cathy Zoi. The Master of Ceremony was Susan Sam Matthews, Executive Director of the Central Vermont Economic Department. Earlier in the year, SBE Inc. won a matching grant of $9.1 million as the major piece of funding for an $18 million project under the U.S. Department of Energy’s Electrical Drive Vehicle Battery and Component Manufacturing Initiative, part of President Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, to expand its electric car technology manufacturing. SBE’s new manufacturing plant facility will be dedicated to the transportation market and will have capacity to produce Power Ring capacitors for over 100,000 plug-in hybrid and electric drive vehicles within 3 years.
