How to improve the safety of new energy vehicle battery connectors?
The connector industry chain covers from upstream metal materials, plastic materials, and electroplating materials to downstream automobiles, communications, consumer electronics, defense, and military industries, and many other fields. The upstream of the industry is mainly raw material processing industries such as ferrous metals, non-ferrous metals, rare metals, engineering plastics, etc. The price and transportation costs of upstream raw materials are the key to the cost control of connectors.
However, because the upstream is mostly bulk commodities, the price volatility is low, and because there are many suppliers, connector companies generally do not expand their supply chain system upstream based on economies of scale. As the basic unit for transmitting signals and exchanging information, the connector determines that all terminal products involved in the field of electronic information need to be used, so the downstream of the connector covers almost the entire field of the electronic industry. However, due to differences in terminal demand and the degree of informatization of single products in different fields, the market size of subdivided connectors is quite different. For example, according to Bishop & Associates, the global automotive connector market in 2018 reached US$15.8 billion, while the connector in the defense and aerospace sectors was only US$3.9 billion, only about 25% of the automotive sector.
Connector miniaturization, wireless, high-speed, and intelligence is a major trend. At present, the global connector industry is at the starting point of a new round of creative demand represented by 5G and new energy vehicles. In terms of new energy vehicles, on the technical side, the typical four major systems of electric vehicles—high power density battery packs, battery chargers and space appliances, inverters, and DC-DC controllers—the system has added a lot of connector content, and the automotive electronics The pace is also accelerating with popularity. With the continuous improvement of core system technologies such as supply-side batteries, the mid-term ramp-up of production capacity, the stimulus of demand-side policies, and the shift in consumer demand preferences, etc., the field of new energy vehicles may be entering the starting point of creative demand.
In terms of 5G communication, according to the official website of Aerospace Electric Company, 5G Massive MIMO technology directly leads to three trends in the development of base station antennas: 1) passive to active antenna development, 2) RRH and antenna integration, and 3) fiber optic replacement of feeders. In terms of energy consumption, such as power connectors for base stations, they can meet the increasing current requirements while providing a smaller package. For the 48VVV DC power supply commonly used in the field of communication, the current density carried by a single chip (chip) of its power supply connector continues to increase, from 30A→40A→50A→60A or even higher. At the same time, the development trend of miniaturization and compactness of equipment requires connectors to occupy a smaller space. For example, dense blade servers in data centers replace rack servers. Running these more compact systems requires connectors with higher power density and signal density.
