autoregion international - Edition 1/2020

22 ESTRA – Developing efficient thermal products By Didier Beaugé, VP Engineering, ESTRA ESTRA is a global automotive thermal systems manufacturer operating 14 manufacturing facilities in China, Korea, Poland, Mexico, Russia, India and Thailand with more than 3,000 employees. Images: © ESTRA The company was renamed ESTRA in Sep- tember 2019 to finalize the integration of SDAAC and erae Automotive under the same company name - their coming to- gether and joining forces allows ESTRA to service its customers globally and provide them with high-quality solutions in a flexi- ble, responsive way. ESTRA has four technical centers located in Europe, China, Korea and North America. The European technical center, located in Luxembourg, was opened in 2016. This technical center is in charge of devel- oping the new generation of heat exchang- ers for air conditioning, powertrain and battery cooling systems. The site develops new technologies for Internal Combustion Engines (ICE) as well as for New Energy Ve- hicles (Battery Electric Vehicles - BEV and Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicles - PHEV). The Luxembourg team is working closely together with the team located in the man- ufacturing site in Poland, near Katowice, which will launch its first product in pro- duction at the end of 2020. The new legislations for vehicle emissions are driving extensive development of new technologies to continuously improve overall performance and efficiency. Natu- rally, this calls for improvements in thermal products as well. This is why in order to reduce the mass of the heat exchangers and provide better value to its customers, ESTRA is focusing on developing low gauge primary compo- nents. The engineering team is currently working on the development of a low gauge monotube Charge Air Cooler able to fulfill the most stringent durability and performance requirements. More pre- cisely, it is helping to reduce the mass of heat exchanger components by 10% while decreasing the internal pressure drop by up to 5% - which in turn contributes to the overall reduction of CO 2 emissions. This product has been developed with cus- tomer performance targets in mind, but it also had to respect the most severe dura- bility requirements in terms of pressure cycles, thermal cycles and corrosion. The team worked towards a technical solution that would fit these stringent specifica- tions and succeeded. The end product is an extremely competitive low gauge mono- tube Charge Air Cooler. ESTRA’s competitive advantage stems from its intense focus on listening and adapting to customer’s unique require- ments, and in the state-of-the-art tools utilized by the team. Indeed, all projects are started by precise customer requirements analysis. This analysis is then translated into product definition using simulation tools such as Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) or Finite Element Analysis (FEA), proto- type building and manufacturing feasibil- ity study. The same tools will be applied throughout the entire project development phase. Growing from 0 to 70 employees in less than three years, ESTRA Luxembourg is now focusing on the development and the wellbeing of its team. Thecompanywill begrowing further in2020 to around 90 employees and is currently recruiting Product Engineers, Designers, and Quality Engineers to strengthen its Luxembourg team. For more information on ESTRA’s activities, you can visit their website or their LinkedIn page, where the job openings are regularly updated. LinkedIn https://t1p.de/7d9j ESTRA Luxembourg www.estra-automotive.com Vincent Nautet, Senior FEA Engineer ESTRA Heat Exchangers dissipator S H A R E