Tesla - Motor Design Team
Released +100 parts and 2D drawings (using CATIA) with full GD&T to ensure form, fit, and function at the component and system level, participating in multiple R&D projects for the motor design team. Among all of them, my two major projects have been:
Carbon fiber sleeve rotor
o Owned the design of a fatigue tester used for highly accelerated life testing to optimize and validate sleeved rotors on multiple drive unit programs.
o Saved +$400k directly to the company by working on a fully customized design oriented for this specific application, which prevented the need to purchase several non-optimized machines to obtain the required results.
o Streamlined the process to test the sleeved rotors, minimizing the use of resources (from 3-4 employees needed for the test to 1) and reduced by ~10x the time to obtain high-quality results, facilitating fast design iterations.
o Optimized the design and the material selection by creating FEA models in ANSYS allowing for a design that can withstand over 50kN of tension during its lifespan.
Performed tolerance stackup analysis to minimize manufacturing discrepancies and guarantee the reliability of the results.
Resolver sensor
o Owned the full development (including mechanical, electrical, & software) of a test rig that allows for easy detection and prediction of the effect of non-ideal conditions on the accuracy and precision of the resolver, with a resolution of up to 1µm.
o Engineered an indispensable tool to test and validate old and new future program sensors (6 different sensors to date).
o Programed the software to control the different actuators, as well as monitor the acquired high-frequency analog and digital signals, using LabView and multiple DAQs from National Instruments.
o Programed multiple post-processing Python and MATLAB scripts of +500 lines/script to analyze the collected data and extrapolate the needed information to drive design improvements at the component and system level.
o Participated in the development of a position sensor component from concept to high-volume production, providing valuable insights into designing plastic injection molded parts, particularly with Glass-filled nylon.
o Helped root cause and characterize a critical resolver signal issue, optimizing the resources allocation to solve it before SOP.
o Designed custom fixtures to adapt the test rig for diverse sensor configurations across all drive unit programs, optimizing testing efficiency and data consistency.
(Image source: https://www.minebeamitsumi.com/english/strengths/column/resolver/ )