E-Mobility Engineering 014 l InoBat Auto dossier l In Conversation: Brandon Fisher l Battery monitoring focus l Supercapacitor applications insight l Green-G ecarry digest l Lithium-sulphur batteries insight l Cell-to-pack batteries focus

came to move over to MillenWorks, which had been founded by the famous rally car driver Rod Millen and was a really sought-after place to work, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity.” MillenWorks’ engineers were known as the ‘suspension gurus’ for the US military, and indeed Fisher soon found himself working on a new kind of vehicle demonstrator: a hybrid-electric military transport vehicle that soon became known as the MillenWorks Light Utility Vehicle. “At the time, there really wasn’t anything to base that powertrain on,” he says. “Sure, the Toyota Prius had just come out, but this was a military product, so we built it from the ground up, and it was later used by Textron as a contender for the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle contract for the US military. “We built the battery modules, battery pack and vehicle structure all from blank sheets. We even rented a plot of land and built some test courses that mimicked proving grounds such as the Aberdeen military test course in Maryland, so that we could run tests and provide data to the Department of Defense. “That was a 14-month project in which we designed, prototyped and tested a vehicle with all sorts of new technologies. It was a never-before- seen type of electric drivetrain, with a couple of 150 kW UQM motor and inverter pairings for traction, integrated at the front and rear in an all-wheel- drive configuration, which led us to call it a road-coupled series parallel- hybrid.” Its powertrain incorporated a Steyr turbodiesel and generator as its range extender, mounted in line with a hybrid transaxle assembly (which happened to be built around an Eaton automated manual transmission system) to the rear wheels. The pack was constructed around 18650 cells from A123 Systems, traditionally used in power tools, and independent semi-active damping suspension systems were integrated at the front and rear. Into Eaton After a year working as an independent engineering consultant, largely on projects alongside his former employers and teammates across Saleen and MillenWorks, Fisher “My original internship was meant to be 3 months, but they requested that I extend it to 6, because we were on a launch platform and they really wanted us to keep doing what we were doing,” he explains. “I still had two quarters of courses I needed to complete at Cal Poly, but then they asked if I wanted to do my senior project with them too. That project was all about making a new kind of brake caliper, and Saleen provided a lot of the funding and materials I needed, as well as the test platform.” This momentum from electromechanics into vehicle and structural dynamics motivated Saleen’s management to put Fisher into r&d in chassis systems dynamics as a full-time engineer, particularly in developing new suspension systems, brakes and anti- roll bars through intensive road- and shock-testing of vehicle platforms. “There was a lot of subsystem-level fine tuning to see how that would benefit system-level performance, with a lot of really cutting-edge electronics and data acquisition tech for the time,” he recounts. “We would develop those parts in the lab, rush out to the proving ground, and test them to see if we were making Saleen’s sportscars perform faster and better.” Fisher’s work as a chassis systems engineer at Saleen lasted for about 18 months, during which he gained extensive experience in the design, building and testing of numerous Saleen Mustangs as well as the Saleen S7 supercar, originally built from the ground up as a racecar before being spun out into a production roadcar. “That was a great learning ground, because I worked for some of the best- known engineers in the industry, and I got to work on car designs that had stemmed from numerous race winners, including winners of the 24 Hours of Le Mans GT class,” he adds. “You got to see first-hand how racing drives automotive innovations within strict timelines, so when the opportunity After Eaton’s acquisition of Cooper-Bussman in 2011, Fisher quickly began specialising in power distribution systems such as this Summer 2022 | E-Mobility Engineering 17 InConversation | Brandon Fisher