Institution news
Please can you kindly explain your role and involvement with these technologies.
Timothy Bingham (TB): As a systems engineer designing systems and managing integrations across various disciplines thermal management is a key area of involvement, especially with respect to thermally managing energy storage systems and powertrains for aerospace.
What is the number one challenge for engineers working on vehicle thermal management systems, in your opinion?
TB: For aerospace applications mass is always a vital area to minimise, so understanding the effectiveness of a battery cooling system with the given constraints such as operating temperature or thermal gradients, and then optimising to reduce mass is a significant challenge.
What is the most important development in this field at the moment, either within your organisation or in the industry in general?
TB: Understanding the relationship between thermal management strategy and cell cycle life, is an interesting area of development. This also extends to creating battery cooling strategies that facilitate cell second life beyond flying.
What technology in particular would you say is the technology to watch in the industry?
TB: The engineering applied to the development of cooling fluids other than water based, these are displaying some appealing opportunities especially from a dielectric aspect.
What can attendees expect from your presentation at this year’s conference?
TB: Hopefully attendees will gain a more technical insight of the engineering journey that went into delivering the record-breaking world’s fastest electric aircraft. From the outset of the project the cooling system design was large area of development that needed to be high performance while offering a great level of safety.
What other topics are you looking forward to hearing about and discussing at the upcoming conference?
TB: I will be looking forward to hearing more about thermal management simulation approaches for various applications.
Why do you feel it is important for all engineers to attend the VTMS conference?
TB: The VTMS conference offers a great opportunity to see and learn more about various cutting edge engineering progressions that are not just constrained to the traditional realm of academia, but also within industry. A focus is applied to the current and future area of development around electrification.
The Institution's Vehicle Thermal Management Systems Conference and Exhibition takes place on 14-15 June at the British Motor Museum.
VTMS 15 will showcase the latest research and technological advances in heat transfer, energy management, thermal comfort and the efficient integration and control of all thermal systems within vehicles. Don't miss this opportunity to benefit from the experience of engineers operating across multiple industries, learn the lessons from recent projects and understand how common problems are being addressed: visit www.imeche.org/vtms for full details.