Conti Suits Up

A team of young innovators aims to transform a critical piece of safety equipment - and create new business - through collaboration.

October 1, 2019

Lindsay Brooke

Continental engineers Sebastian Dietz (at left) and Carsten Kellings with the prototype Schöffel safety jacket at Conti’s Hannover proving ground.

Few colors shock the human brain into attention more than high-visibility Yellow. “Hi-viz” as it’s known in the safety-apparel industry, is an on-the-job requirement for first responders, road workers, tow-truck drivers, linesmen, loggers, couriers, coast guard deck crews – any all-weather vocation for which being seen in low-visibility situations can make the difference between life and death. Included are overnight package-delivery drivers who must sprint across busy city streets – at night, in the fog and rain - to deliver the goods.

But hi-viz, even when combined with reflective fabrics, is often not sufficient for wearers to be seen.

The technology of so-called “technical garments” (including those rugged-fabric jackets, vests, trousers and boots that protect recreational wearers in skiing, cycling and off-road motorcycling) isn’t a topic we typically cover in Automotive Engineering. In fact, this article is a first – and it’s more about how Continental AG is leveraging its engineering depth and breadth across business sectors to engage new markets than it is about fabric denier (a unit of measurement that expresses fiber thickness of individual threads or filaments in textiles) and thread count.

And it could emerge as a significant revenue driver, as automated and connected driving systems enter the market in volume, the company’s top engineers predict.

Co-pacing ideation

The electrified/ illuminated vest version of the garment concept includes eye-catching LED lights for safety, as well as a heating system that enables energy consumption for heating the vehicle cabin to be reduced by up to 90 percent. Could this be standard ‘wearable’ equipment for future UPS and Amazon Prime delivery personnel?

The retina-burning prototype jacket shown here “takes Continental’s expertise in electronics, safety and quality and literally puts those things on people doing their jobs,” explained Carsten Kellings, who was engineering leader in Conti’s Intelligent Functional Materials, Systems and Technology group during the prototype development. The cross-divisional project, he noted, aims at taking safety-apparel visibility to the next level by integrating LED lighting into the garment.

The lighting – its battery to be charged inductively – complements the reflective fabric that is standard on many high-end professional and sporting garments.

The unique collaboration between Kellings’ team (now led by Hans Schroth) and the Conti Innovations group brings high levels of start-up energy, and a degree of managed risk, to the project. They worked with Schöffel, a leading German manufacturer of premium outdoor technical apparel, that served as the OEM.

“We had the idea to do something outside the automotive business, looking toward the future - 2025, 2030,” Kellings told AE last summer during an IAA tech preview at Conti’s Hannover proving ground. “We began by asking first: Is this realistic? Can we provide the electronic stuff? Then we had to search for partners in the clothing industry.

“We thought to use our expertise in Electronics, something we’re known for with high quality, to bring wireless power transfer to the technical safety jacket,” he said.

Added Sebastian Dietz, an electrical engineer with Conti Innovations: “There is no real fixed schedule of meetings in this collaboration,” he explained. “It all depends on when the ideas pop up. We then talk about the concept and what needs to be done. How much budget do we need? How many people? It starts out as a virtual engineering team, then as it gets more concrete we meet in person.”

“It’s a very flexible team approach using small teams and the many engineering and development synergies that Continental has,” said Kellings. The supplier has steadily expanded the ways in which it encourages intrepreneurial and entrepreneurial ideas generated by the more than 50,000 engineers (about 15,000 in software development) out of about 243,000 total employees.

Engineers can present their ideas to management in sporting-like “pitch nights,” with the most promising ideas then led to germinate in Conti’s start-up “hub.” Called Co-pace, it includes a tech incubator and a co-operation program that are closely allied with a corporate venture-capital arm that supports them financially when the ideas blossom into market-feasible products.

A recent start-up that was spun-off (in 2017) is PassiveBolt. Based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, this nascent company founded by a Conti engineer developed, through Co-pace, a turnkey “smart” mechatronic door-lock module that is already making waves among the smart-door-lock industry.

Unzipping the tech inside

The heated-and-illuminated prototype safety jackets unveiled by Continental in 2019 are among a wave of “smart wearables” that could “revolutionize the way we use technology in everyday situations and improve safety on the road,” according to the company.

At CES ‘19, Continental executives said the technology offers future opportunities, because it further expands the interaction with the vehicle electronics. They said sensors in the vehicle occupants’ clothing could determine data such as humidity and temperature and, based on this, actuate the automatic climate control system.

Kellings and Dietz explain that the goal in developing electronics for an extreme-use safety jacket with LED illumination and an optional heating function is to activate those functions automatically when the driver exits the driver’s seat.

A tubular plastic light bar snakes through the garment; it has an LED on one end, and a mirror to reflect the light. A thin-form-factor lithium battery powers the LEDs through wiring incorporated into the garment’s fabric. The battery plus its control electronics are sized so that they can be slipped into a pocket of the jacket. A coil within the driver’s seat inductively charges the batteries for the LEDs and the integral heating system.

This arrangement maintains an adequate state of charge in the jacket, Kellings said. A flexible second coil in the jacket absorbs the power from the seat coil.

Various material layers maintain the garment’s integrity when it is laundered, while shielding the driver from the electro-magnetic field.

Innovative new electrified-and-connected garments could help “revolutionize” road safety for commuter and recreational cyclists, scooter riders and motorcyclists, Conti engineers believe.

Power requirements “could be in the 5-watt range,” noted Dietz. “It depends on what you want to charge. The LED lights only need a little amount of energy to flash it. From the measurements we’ve done so far, we don’t see any issues with a magnetic field on the back of the jacket.” He said the degree of illumination will be determined by use case. Some users may not want themselves lit up like a carnival ride, so as to not distract traffic, for example.

Kellings noted that the concept “could go beyond jackets into trousers, hats, shoes...it could also be used in cyclists’ jackets,” he said. “Raise your left hand to signal a left turn, and the left sleeve illuminates and flashes. We have so many ideas but the jackets are the first step. They’re really cool and make it easy to understand the technology’s potential.” He and Dietz observed that electronics integrated into jackets is a new concept, “like airbag vests that came out a few years ago.”

The optional heating function goes beyond the vital role of providing driver comfort. In delivery vehicles, which are increasingly battery-electric, the jacket heating system can help reduce the energy required to heat the cabin by up to 90%. That helps optimize vehicle range, by heating the driver rather than the cargo area, the engineers explained.

New electrically-conductive materials under development could replace the heating-filament wires that Conti currently employs in the Schöffel prototypes. These new materials feature a conductive, coatable polymer compound that would be printed into the textiles. Electricity flowing through the fabric would be directly converted to heat – rapidly warming the surface with relatively low power input.

“It’s important to know if you need inductive charging or not,” Kellings said. “The choice of materials and the level of electronics depends on the range of uses – daily use, for example, or for rough work outside, or for sports such as skiing. Will you be sitting in a vehicle? All of these determine design elements such as ease of access into the jacket. We knew nothing about jacket design and learned a lot from Schöffel in this project. And they learned some things about electronics from us.”

Continental’s unconventional electric safety jacket development project is not yet finalized. “We continue to develop new materials and technologies for it, and are looking for other partners to develop prototypes as a step toward really serious production,” Kellings said with more than a hint of optimism.