Electric Vehicle Components

Automotive and aerospace manufacturers are increasingly turning to fiber lasers to resolve their manufacturing challenges.

A new two-part webinar from IDTechEx is available on Additive Manufacturing and Lightweight Materials for Aerospace and Defense.

In the recently published IDTechEx market report titled Fiber Lasers 2018-2028: Technologies, Opportunities, Markets & Forecasts, Dr Nilushi Wijeyasinghe explores how recent fiber laser technology developments affect the growth of key market segments.

Thermoelectric harvesting will be on production hybrid electric on-road vehicles from 2018. It will be commonplace on hybrids in 2020 and almost entirely to charge the battery, or increasingly supercapacitor or supercabattery used for power.

SiC devices will be widely designed into electric vehicles from 2014 and GaN from 2018. With manufacturers currently designing vehicles to be launched onto the market in 2018, it is predicted that by this date GaN semiconductors will attain price parity with silicon devices. This will make the technology attractive as a replacement for silicon for use in the power electronics in both pure electric and hybrid vehicles.

Supercapacitors are increasing the range of electric vehicles in several ways and by doing so they are hugely increasing the addressable market for those vehicles. Typically, they last for the life of the vehicle regardless of how many cycles are endured.

Questions arise as to how much supercapacitors can improve if organisations more like NASA took over. After all, if supercapacitors can replace many batteries when, as today, they store one tenth of their energy, what will happen in the marketplace if they approach the theoretical ten times the lithium-ion battery figure while acting as a near-perfect "battery"?

All electric vehicles have at least one traction motor, so the market for electric vehicle traction motors is one of the largest markets for electric vehicle parts and a primary determinant of the performance and affordability of a given vehicle. Indeed, IDTechEx Research finds that in 2013 44.6 million electric motors will be needed for vehicles, rising to 147.7 million in 2023.

IDTechEx has recently launched an online browser-based Market Intelligence Portal , bringing you in-depth market intelligence and independent analysis throughout the year.

The new report from IDTechEx titled Printed, Organic & Flexible Electronics: Forecasts, Players & Opportunities 2013-2023 finds that the total market for these technologies will grow from $16.04 billion in 2013 to $76.79 billion in 2023.