Engineering Capabilities

Introduction

Talon Process

New Eagle incorporates best practices from a variety of disciplines to ensure timely delivery of quality products within budget. We call this our Talon Development Process, a proven process utilized over many full system life cycles for our customers.

The Talon process contains elements which help manage:

• Program timing, deliverables and budgets
• System development and integration
• Software and hardware development
• Change control and defect tracking

Designed to be scalable and flexible:

• Works equally well for fast paced, low budget prototype projects and high-volume production programs
• Flexible for adapting to the differing process and documentation requirements of a diverse customer base and regulatory environment

Core Competencies

New Eagle engineers offer system engineering and custom embedded control systems solutions including system designs, development, implementation, and integration tools and processes. Services that are provided by New Eagle include controls, production software testing, component and hardware selection and development, user interface devices, and long-term customer support.

Systems Engineering

(EV) Electric and (HEV) Hybrid Vehicles

New Eagle has its hybrid and electric vehicles team. Our expertise lies in the integration of the vehicle electronics, energy-storage and powertrain controls. We can help you create, integrate and execute your plan! New Eagle’s engineering team has experience helping its clients move from initial concept to prototype to production working as either consultants or integral developers of the system.

Relative to the experience of Hybrid/Electric Vehicles, we bring application experience in the following ways:

• Advisor for Design/Technology
  • Electrical System Architecture
  • Experience in parallel, series and power split hybrid system

• Systems Engineering
  • Powertrain
  • Chassis
  • Body
  • HVAC

• Drivetrain
  • Electric motor
  • Inverter
  • Transmission

• Energy Storage Systems
  • Batteries, ultra-capacitors, chargers

• Controls and Software Development
  • EV Supervisory control

• Energy Optimization
  • Fuel economy/range simulation
  • Engine control – range extenders

• Vehicle and Component Validation

• Low and High Voltage Wiring Design

Controls Engineering

Model-Based Control System Development

In the field of Mobile Hydraulics, we use model-based design to solve problems that other approaches are not equipped to solve. Distributed, complex, and safe control systems are often only possible with model-based design. A controls primer can help explain key items of our controls offering. We are contrasting New Eagle's Model-Based Design approach against class Electro-Hydraulics controls development.

Control Systems Primer

Control engineering or control systems engineering is the engineering discipline that applies control theory to design systems with desired behaviors. The practice uses sensors to measure the output performance of the device being controlled (often a vehicle and sometimes called the “Plant”) and those measurements can be used to give feedback to the input actuators that can make corrections toward desired performance. When a device is designed to perform without the need of human inputs for correction it is called automatic control (such as cruise control for regulating a car's speed). Multi-disciplinary in nature, control systems engineering activities focus on implementation of control systems mainly derived by mathematical modeling of systems of a diverse range.

Open-Loop versus Closed-Loop Control

In most of the cases, control engineers utilize feedback when designing control systems. This is often accomplished using a PID controller system and called Closed-Loop. For example, in an automobile with cruise control the vehicle's speed is continuously monitored and fed back to the system, which adjusts the motor's torque accordingly. Where there is regular feedback, control theory can be used to determine how the system responds to such feedback. In practically all such systems stability is important and control theory can help ensure stability is achieved.

Although feedback is an important aspect of control engineering, control engineers may also work on the control of systems without feedback. This is known as open-loop control. A classic example of open loop control is a washing machine that runs through a pre-determined cycle without the use of sensors.

State Observer

In control theory, a state observer is a system that models a real system in order to provide an estimate of its internal state, given measurements of the input and output of the real system. It is typically a computer-implemented mathematical model. Knowing the system state is necessary to solve many control theory problems; for example, stabilizing a system using state feedback. In most practical cases, the physical state of the system cannot be determined by direct observation. Instead, indirect effects of the internal state are observed by way of the system outputs. A common example is vehicle speed sensing. A vehicle cannot measure its own speed but it can measure effects of the speed such as rotational wheel speed, and other states such as steering wheel angle. Based on these output measurements and the model of the vehicle, the vehicle speed can be continuously estimated. If a system is observable, it is possible to fully reconstruct the system state from its output measurements using the state observer.

A Primer Only

This section is intended to be a primer only, and does not include many of the additional concepts and approaches of New Eagle including Distributed systems, Adaptive Control, Gain Scheduling, Non-linear, and other topics.

New Eagle’s Electro-Hydraulics controls applications usually require a mix of open and closed-loop systems and observers. The complexity of each application usually requires custom software and approaches that are maintain efficient, fast, and cost effective solutions.

Model-Based Design and MotoHawk

New Eagle is an adherent of model-based design using Mathworks and the MotoHawk embedded system. In Electro-Hydraulics, our competition uses what we classify as Electro-Hydraulics programming techniques, which typically come from the former ladder logic world. There is a large class of problems to solve using these tools. However, we solve complex control problems that optimize the system using Model-based design techniques.

Some examples of E-H control using MotoHawk are found below.