General Motors | EPFL Graph Search

General Motors abrégé en GM (ou General Motors Corporation abrégée en GMC) est un constructeur automobile américain basé à Détroit dans le Michigan, aux États-Unis, qui contrôlait encore une quinzaine de marques à la fin des années 1990. La société a été fondée en 1908 par William Crapo Durant. Son successeur Alfred P. Sloan en a fait le plus grand fabricant automobile au monde entre 1931 et 2005 et en 2011. Alors que son titre avait perdu 95 % de sa valeur, le groupe a bénéficié d'une nationalisation temporaire en 2009, qui a duré un an et demi, ses dettes ayant été remplacées par des capitaux propres (equity). Depuis 2014, la directrice de General Motors est Mary Barra et son président est l'Américain Dan Ammann. En 2014, General Motors a vendu 9,92 millions de véhicules dans le monde (en hausse de 2 % par rapport à 2013). Après la cession de Saab en 2010, le retrait de Daewoo en 2005, de Chevrolet en 2014 et la vente de GM Europe (Opel/Vauxhall) en 2017, le groupe américain ne po

Control of Current in AC Induction Machines with Pronounced Slot Harmonics for Smooth Torque

Nicolas Lorétan

AC introduction motors have been used in traction applications for a long time. They have a good efficiency for a low cost and are very robust. Most of these motors have been developed for industrial applications and they have a torque ripple because of the presence of slot harmonics. The smoothness of the torque is important for traction applications ands the torque ripple should be reduced or even suppressed without loss of eficiency.

2011

Comparative study and selection criteria of linear motors

Samuel Chevailler

Initially, linear motors have been particularly dedicated to transportation systems. Nowadays, linear motors are meant to replace a system using a rotating motor and a transmission to realize a linear movement. With linear motors the performances increase considerably since the mechanical limitations are removed. This leads to a better precision, a higher acceleration and a higher speed of the moving part. Therefore, direct drives with linear motors are increasingly used in industrial applications although these solutions need often more investment costs. Different linear motor structures and technologies exist. They can be either induction or synchronous motors with a transverse or a longitudinal flux. Furthermore, linear motors may have several topologies. They can be either long or short stator and double or single sided. All these variants may be combined giving therefore numerous possibilities to perform a linear movement. Hence, to make the best choice for a given application, a global methodology based on the comparison of optimized motors is presented in the thesis. This design methodology is based on figure of merits which are bound to the specifications of the studied application. This method differs from a conventional one since optimized motors with the same objective function are compared. The optimized motors are obtained by an indirect method based on an optimization algorithm (Sequential Quadratic Programming, SQP). An indirect approach differs from the conventional deterministic one for which at least one parameter must be fixed to obtain a motor pre design, since there are constraints and validity domain which are introduced. The proposed methodology can be applied either to rotating or to linear motor design. The use of an optimization program to perform motor designs requires analytical motor models. The models developed in this thesis take into account the thermal behavior of the motors in order to achieve more realistic results. Furthermore, the analytical models of synchronous motors are thoroughly studied leading to several interesting conclusions. They are based on well known algorithms developed for rotating motors. The proposed models are very accurate in comparison with the FEM program, except for a transversal flux linear motor for which the obtained results are not worthwhile enough to be optimized. This is caused by the structure of the motor which is close to a reluctant motor and imposes to model the motor by a lumped magnetic scheme. Moreover, a global analysis of the windings due to the particularity of linear motor to have an even or odd number of poles is presented in the thesis. The methodology proposed in the thesis is successfully used for an innovative application which deals with a multi mobile system for a lift. For this lift, several cabins travel in the same shaft implying linear motors to move autonomously each cabin. First, by comparing the different motor technologies, the best motor type is selected. Afterwards, the motor windings for the selected motors are analyzed and compared in order to find the most adapted one for this application. The motor is finally optimized, leading to a motor design proposal. This motor design takes into account the thermal behavior, the material cost and the electrical characteristic of the linear motor.

EPFL2006

Fully automated modulation of virtual-body ownership supresses fronto-parietal mu rhythm

Olaf Blanke, Nathaniel Evans

After continuously applying spatially and temporally congruent visuo-tactile stimulation to external, body-like objects, healthy humans feel the fake part to be the origin of the touch sensations and feel it to be their own. Incongruent stimulation nullifies both illusory changes. This Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI) is the most used paradigm to experimentally investigate healthy humans’ bodily self-consciousness and the extension of body ownership to foreign objects [1]. Standard RHI setups are limited by physical constraints and suffer the disadvantage of imprecise temporo-spatial stimulus control. Further, little is known about the neural and electrophysiological mechanisms associated with the crossmodal conflict and the induced changes in body ownership during the RHI. Here we recorded 64-channel electroencephalography (EEG) to investigate the electrophysiological changes while exposed to a carefully controlled, bilateral RHI induced by haptics and virtual reality (VR) technology. Methods Participants (n=8) sat at a table with a chin rest. Arms were placed (palms up) underneath the table to rest on the legs. A virtual scene depicting the real-world experimental scene was displayed on an immersive Head Mounted Display (HMD). We employed a 2x2 factorial design (Object, Stroking). Participants saw either two arms or two non-body cylinders (Object) projecting from their shoulders onto a virtual table, seeing the virtual arms or cylinder in a position ~20cm above their real arms. Visuo-tactile stimulation was provided by four vibration motors affixed to the palms of the (unseen) left and right hands and by animation of corresponding virtual motors on the virtual hands. Two visuo-tactile modes were defined (Stroking): 1) synchronous: virtual visual motors were shown to vibrate in temporal and spatial synchrony with the tactile vibration motors and 2) asynchronous: virtual visual motors were shown to vibrate with a temporal delay (100±50ms) and a randomly selected spatial direction with respect to the tactile vibration motor pattern. Two additional baseline conditions were recorded (no visual animation of the virtual motors and no tactile stimulation; no visual animation of the virtual motors with tactile stimulation). Subjective experience of the illusion was gauged by a questionnaire. 64-channel EEG was sampled at 2048Hz. Bipolar electrooculograms were recorded for later artifact removal. EEG analysis consisted of breaking 30s of spontaneous EEG data per condition into epochs of 2s. Epochs contaminated with eye blink artifacts or transient changes in electrode-to-scalp conductance were removed. Spectral power changes were computed in three frequency bands: alpha (8-13 Hz), beta (14-30 Hz) and gamma (30-100 Hz). Statistical analysis was performed at the scalp level and included a suprathreshold cluster permutation test to control for Type I errors. The generators of the significant scalp maps were localized with an inverse solution (sLORETA) [2]. Results Repeated ANOVA analysis of the questionnaire indicated a significant interaction between synchrony and question (F=1.65, p=0.03), and a main synchrony effect (F=40.29, p