Engineering Services
Product Development
Our Engineering Services group was created simply because customers asked for help. They needed a product that they could not just buy on the market. Somehow the price was too high, there were too many extras they didn’t need, or the size was too large. Or, people must have a totally new and unique solution to their problem.
Many companies have also scaled down their own engineering teams and decided to outsource the tasks not considered to be the core of the firm’s technology. This is done to save cost but also due to the difficulty of finding and maintaining needed expertise in-house, particularly during economic expansion.
When a customer goes to a large firm with a request to develop an innovative solution and build a prototype to prove the idea would work, he is always shocked by the cost of doing the work. So most customers can’t afford it, and often do not even bother to attempt this kind of development. This is unfortunate because making something new is the only chance the U.S. has to compete with low labor-cost countries.
Potomac Electric is a small, skilled, high-technology development firm offering results at prices you can afford.
We provide innovative, practical, leading-edge product design. The goal from the start is that our customers must make money as a result of our work.
Sustaining Engineering and Product Support
Along with new product development, Potomac Electric also provides engineering services for the “trailing edge” of technology as well! Machine builders and large end-users come to us when they have the problem of maintaining obsolete products. They tell us, “We have 500 machines in the field and we can’t support motors, drives, and controllers. We need a practical, low-cost retrofit package.” And we develop a solution!
Although not glamorous, solving the obsolescence problem of machines in the field is very important. The customer just can’t afford to throw away expensive machines. Helping to run them goes along with our principle — finding a practical, economical way to help our customers make money!
Engineering and Development Capabilities
For the last 15 years, Potomac Electric has been helping customers in:
- New Product Design, prototype, and testing
- Verification and Field Failure Analysis of an existing product
- Buy vs. Make decisions
- Independent Testing and Evaluation of various products
We specialize in the following areas:
- DC motor design
- High-performance Brushless motors and Drive controls for servo applications
- Low-cost Brushless motors and controls to replace DC and Induction motors
- State of the art drive electronics with current, velocity, and position control
- Vector control and Sensorless brushless drives
- Independent Performance analysis and verification of motor-drive systems
- Mechanical design of rotating electromechanical control systems
Any motor control system, whether a hybrid vehicle, medical diagnostics machine, antenna positioning system, washing machine, or treadmill, requires the same steps in its development:
- Product definition and specification
- Computer simulation
- Design of components and prototyping
- Circuit boards layout and fabrication
- Microprocessor firmware design
- System testing and verification
- Thermal testing, reliability, cost, packaging, and UL/CE testing
- Tooling and manufacturing assemblies process design
- Preproduction run.
And, of course, understanding the industry, the application, and the cost of the final product are critical. Potomac Electric has a small, dedicated team of engineers that will work directly with you without layers of bureaucracy.
Please let us know your needs by clicking contact us. Perhaps we already have the solution to your problem!
Engineering Services