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As Vehicle Engineer readers will know, quenching in heat treatment terminology mean rapid cooling of a part, most often found in hardening steel. Substituting the use of air immediately poses the question: How can air achieve the same rate of quenching as oil? The answer: A 296 kW/400 bhp fan subjects the hot part to high pressure - nearly 300 psi - air in a new process jointly developed by between PSA and Serthel.

PSA Valenciennes employs 665 machines and five heat treatment furnaces to make 7,000 gearboxes a day. Total transmission production since the plant was built in 1980 is stated to be 20 million. Most 'boxes are for mid-range vehicles: Citroën Xsara, Picasso, C3, C5, C8 cars, and Berlingo, Jumpy, C15 and Xanthia Iran vans; Peugeot models 206, 307, 406, 807 cars and Expert and Partner vans; and also Ulysse and Phedra cars and Scudo and Zeta vans from Fiat and Lancia.

Longest running of the gearboxes made here is the BE, in production since 1980. The AL4 automatic 'box, designed and developed co-operatively with Renault since autumn 1997, incorporates quite sophisticated electronics, providing a degree of analysis of driver style and driving conditions to facilitate selection of the most suitable ratios.

Now on the horizon is PSA's new generation of MCP - Mechanical Compact Piloted - six-speed spur gearbox with electrically controlled automatic clutch, and a 13-acre plant is under construction on the site with the intention of producing 17,500 MCPs a week.

The workforce is organised into production teams who meet weekly to discuss problems and ideas, which team leaders pass on to higher management.

Next, we visited another impressive operation, DaimlerChrysler's European Logistics Centre, built in June, 2003. Said to be the most modern of its kind in the group and established to overcome bottlenecks in Chrysler-Jeep spares deliveries to France and Belgium, it handles nine truck deliveries in each 14-hour working day.

Formidable

The centre houses a formidable array of roof-high shelving served by extraordinary high-lift wide-track fork-lift trucks with telescopic 'legs' and 3 km/1.9 miles of friction-driven roller conveyor belts. One could not help but marvel at the number of these well-finished 4 cm/1.6in diameter, 42 cm/16.5in wide rollers every 10cm/4in - more than 30,000 according to a simple calculation.
We then travelled via autoroutes, east through Belgium and south to Metz - an impressive city with its remarkable military remains and handsome houses. - to visit the other PSA transmission factory. This is the "best in the world, representing the benchmark in competitiveness", according to an independent US industrial survey.

Though half the size of PSA Valenciennes, the Metz operation is nonetheless huge - 102 acres, of which 33 acres is covered by the single manufacturing plant. The older of the two, established in June 1969, Metz Borny is credited with having produced 30 million gearboxes, and it accounts for the top and the bottom the PSA transmission spectrum. It employs 2,590 men and women, of whom 104 are executives and 323 are foremen. Two days shifts and a night shift are worked on weekdays, and 200 staff attend over weekends.

Every 19 seconds, Metz Borny knocks out an MA five-speed gearbox - 160 N.m/118 lb ft maximum torque capacity - and has produced 19 million since 1986. The MA is fitted to the Citroën Saxo, C2, C3, C3 Pluriel, Xsara, Berlingo, and C15 van; and also to the Peugeot 106, 206, 206 SW, 307 and Partner van. This amounts to around 40 per cent of the PSA range.

The Toyota lead in the new Aygo/C2/107 collaboration between PSA and Toyota is, one deduces, confirmed by the use a Polish-built Toyota transmission in these cars, despite the MA gearbox being less costly to make. Space available is reportedly too tight for the MA by a few cm.

May 2001 saw the introduction of the MLC family, offered in three forms - MLC, MLUC and MLGU - and 43 variations. These go into the Citroën Xantia, C5, C8 and Jumpy and Jumper vans; the Peugeot 406, 607, 807 and Expert and Boxer vans, and also the Fiat/Lancia Ulysse and Phedra and the Ducato van.
A six-speed version of the MLC with an improved lubrication system came out last June. MLC torque capacity is between 249 N.m/184 lb ft and 350 N.m/258 lb ft, and changes to heat treatment of its parts are projected to increase the maximum to 370 N.m/273 lb ft.

Again, blanks arrive from suppliers and are cut on-site. Equipment includes a fast automatic conveyor belt system and robots, many of them made by COMAU. The two MA production lines are 80 per cent automated, while the two ML lines which are only 50 per cent automated - understandably so because of the lower volumes.

Kept to a minimum, grinding is employed only on bearing and seal surfaces. Broaching is used to cut the internal teeth of synchromesh cones in a single, very fast operation.

Human input

Heat treatment during gear manufacture involves hot oil carburising, fused electrolyte carbon nitriding, and case hardening. PSA Metz, however, continues with oil quench whereas PSA Valenciennes has converted to the newer air-quench system. Shafts, which as usual tend to distort slightly when subjected to heat treatment, are straightened in an automatic bending process.
Assembly is semi-automatic, with a considerable human input as elsewhere. Every gearbox is bench-tested for function and noise at six stations at the end of the line.

Like Valenciennes, Metz-Borny conducts weekly team meetings, and in addition encourages each employee's family to visit the plant, viewing the employee's work area and learning about what the job involves before meeting the works director, Stéphane Papazian. When I remarked that there was so often a wall between workers and top managers, he agreed, saying: "Yes, I aim to break it down."
Thence we drove 24 km/15 miles north to PSA's Trémery plant, which began production in 1971 and makes three petrol and five diesel engines.

 
Gasoline engines produced at Trémery - all four-valve - are the EW7 (1.8-litre 158 kW/116 bhp), EW10 (2-litre 184 kW/135 bhp-241 kW/177 bhp) and EW12 (2.2-litre 214 kW/158 bhp).
collaboration

In addition, the result of another PSA/BMW collaboration, a range of smaller -1.5- and 1.7-litre - engines was due to appear around the end of 2005.

Apart from the DW8 (two-valve indirect injection 1.8 litre, 95 kW/70 bhp), Trémery-produced four-cylinder diesels all have common rail direct injection. They are the DW10 (two-valve 2-litre 121 kW/89 bhp-147 kW/108 bhp), DW10 (four-valve 2-litre 147 kW/108 bhp-182 kW/134 bhp), DW12 (four-valve 2.2-litre 182 kW/134 bhp) and DV6 (four-valve 1.6-litre, 121 kW/89 bhp-147 kW/108 bhp).
Of this line-up the DW8, a relic of Peugeot's first generation diesels, is the oldest unit. It is still found in the Citroën Berlingo commercial vehicle, but for not much longer. The four-valve direct-injection diesels - dubbed HDi - are supplied both to PSA and also to Ford in a now widely-known collaboration.
A collection of six large buildings and many smaller ones, Trémery employs 4,850 people, of whom 3,930 are on the shop floor, and more than 15 per cent are women.

The machine shop handles alloy blocks on six production lines, heads on seven lines, crankshafts and connecting rods on five lines, and camshafts on two lines. Engine ancillaries produced include water pumps, oil pumps and water outlets.

Engine assembly - 300-odd components in each - is conducted on six lines. Daily production amounts to 900-odd EW petrol engines, 4,800 DW diesels and almost 9,000 DV diesels. So it is scarcely surprising that it takes 390 suppliers and 350 truck deliveries each day to sustain the plant.

A tour of the DV machine and assembly shop with plant director Didier Alenton revealed some intriguing detail, among them the 46 cm/8in long drill used to bore oil ways in cylinder blocks, rather than relying on cast-in oil passages. Cast iron cylinder liners are honed by ceramic-tipped tools which, while increasing bores from 73.64 to 73.70mm - a mere 0.34mm or 13.4 thou in old British engineering units - improves the surface finish from 8-12 microns to 2-4.5 microns.

Interesting examples of automation, mostly using ABB or Adept equipment, include robotised fitting of piston rings and tightening of manifold fastenings, though the manifolds themselves are put in place by hand. The DV engines are PSA's first venture into fracture-jointed big ends, presumably with encouragement and help from Ford, which reportedly evolved the principle some time ago in its US plants.

Announcement

All Trémery production is inspected - 5 per cent of engines are test-run - and an average of only 0.3 per cent are scrapped after failing with some defect. The injection system is pressure-leak-tested at its 1,600 bar design maximum.

Our visit coincided with the announcement of an addition to the PSA/Ford collaborative DW diesel range. The 2.2-litre DW12B - known with the suffixes HDi in PSA-speak and TDCi in Ford-talk - has Bosch's latest third generation 1,800 bar piezo-electric seven-nozzle injection system. This allows up to six sub-injections per cycle, which is claimed to reduce raw emissions by a third.

Twin variable-geometry parallel-sequential turbo charging is arranged so that one turbo is sized to deliver boost at low engine speeds and the other at high; and the new particulate filter requires zero maintenance. Measures to reduce radiated noise include a double-walled crankcase, noise damping at the turbine compressor outlets, and fitment of balancer shafts to counter sub-sonic vibration.
Like that of the smaller diesels in the collaboration, the three-year development of DW12B was led by PSA at La Garenne-Colombes. PSA will produce 200,000 units a year at Trémery, and Ford will build similar numbers of a de-tuned version for commercial vehicles at Dagenham, England.

Science park

The final leg of our whistle-stop tour began with a flight from Metz-Nancy airport to Nice, ready to meet information-technology denizens of Sophia Antipolis, billed as Europe's leading science park. Established in 1998 and the youngest of the industrial sites on our itinerary, it also seemed the most ambitious.

To begin with, it is difficult to envisage a more awkward, if highly attractive, setting for any sort of commercial development than the steep foothills of the Alpes Maritimes, as opposed to the fen-like flatness chosen for most such enterprises.

Very different - and much quieter - than the sprawling satanic masses of Valenciennes, Metz or Trémery, Sophia Antipolis accommodates offices mostly, rather than factories. It is an ideas centre, nothing like as physical as a car plant, the biggest of which would swallow the entire floor area of all Sophia's buildings. It extends for 90 miles east to west, accommodating around 450 companies, 12 per cent of them non-French. And it provides 16,300 white-collar jobs, nearly half of them in various forms of IT, and most of the others in call centres.

After viewing the Forum on Micro Electronics exhibition, we called at Esterel Technologies, a software editing company with headquarter in California and offices in Elancourt, France, and Bracknell, England. Esterel's focus is on systems to control airbags, passive restraint, braking, steering, suspension, driver assistance and engines. Its customers include Audi, Autoliv, GM, Johnson Controls, PSA, Renault and, more recently, Toyota.

Thence to another American-based company, Synopsis Inc, which claims to be a world leader in semi-conductor design software. It sells to other semi-conductor outfits, and to the computer, communications, consumer electronics and aerospace industries.

Next we visited Europe Technologies, founded by four former Texas Instruments employees in 1997. It does more than two thirds its business in the automotive field, supplying a variety of electronic controllers and multiplex units to leading manufacturers, such as PSA, Ford and Renault.

Nexo Telematics, with its headquarters in Switzerland, was established in 2001 by Cobra Automotive Technologies, a European maker of electronic automotive security devices. Nexo concentrates on what it claims are state-of-the-art automotive electronics, advanced server development and network operations. Such technology is used by automotive companies, fleet operators and service providers to provide advanced security, emergency services, diagnostics and fleet management.

Software

Our final visit was to a Siemens VDO France undertaking that provides software services to both its parent company and external customers. A comfortable distance, yet not too far from company headquarters in Toulouse, the research and development operation has been at Antipolis since 1999. It works on occupant and driver alertness detection and software platforms for integration of software and hardware in electronic controls.

Unusually for an IT outfit, it has be involved with the ticklish subjectivity of combining ideal ergonomics - in driver-interface technologies such as touch screen systems - with styling. This entails careful co-operation work with OEMs, and thus embraces the ephemeral, perpetually changing fickleness of fashion. At a practical level, this means trying to design a product so that it can be updated without undue expense.

 
This is an intriguing interface between the high-flown near-fantasy innate in electronic control and the down-to-earth world of practical engineering.