Grainger CEME

On November 9, 2018, Professor Banerjee took his ECE 464 class to Delphi Technologies (see above). Students were asked to record their impressions. Following are a few excerpts.
“I got to learn a lot of new and amazing things about the applications of power electronics in real life. We got to witness the whole process: from design and verification to manufacturing of the components.”
“The highlight of my trip was when one of the employees and UIUC alums showed us the EV1 and told us the history about the car. It inspired me to research more about the car and even watch the documentary he recommended, “Who Killed the Electric Vehicle?”
“[T]he EV1. This powerful relic is one that captured my mind as a boy, and drove me to question the standard conventions we are told to uphold. Here it sat before me.”
“What I enjoyed most was seeing their high-voltage testing area, seeing just how dense they pack their inverters and learning about all the challenges of cooling the IGBT devices … from a real-world point of view with design constraints, costs and characteristics of real devices.”
“I learned how safety and reliability for automo[biles] are im-portant. Delphi invest[s a] huge amount of budget and labor to make their product reliable, safe, and long-lasting … One of the most impressive points was their failure analysis. They perform X-ray scanning, hard-cut using epoxy, ultrasonic scanning in water, etc., to find and confirm the causes of failure.”