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Automotive

Waterloo Centre for Automotive Research (WatCAR)

The Waterloo Centre for Automotive Research (WatCAR) promotes world-class research in support of the automotive sector. (See Website

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Transcription:

Waterloo Centre for Automotive Research (WatCAR)
Michael J. Worswick, PhD, Peng
Professor, Director of WatCAR

WatCar is basically I suppose a packaging of our automotive activities into a single center so we can better expose, interact and coordinator our activities with industry and government groups that we work with. It’s extremely broad; it encompasses a number of thrust areas - automotive manufacturing, vehicle systems…so that would be safety control systems, that kind of thing, suspension systems, electronics communications. Then we have human factors, design, environment, alternative fuels…so fuel cells, hybrid vehicles the mix. And then finally vehicle safety, so crash-worthiness of manufactured components and vehicle systems, that kind of thing.

With our work we’re doing a lot of substitution putting in advanced high strength steels which are thinner and therefore lighter. Aluminum alloys where we’re basically putting in light metals in and getting the structural weight down. So the benefit is that the car companies now know how to use these materials more effectively in terms of forming and joining, for example, and then that allows them to make lighter cars which ultimately reduces fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions and basically gives you a better product overall in terms of response because its lighter.

The availability first of all of this large mass of researchers who engage with the automotive sector is a primary focus. First of all, gives you that critical mass that you can leverage. That plus the type of funding that the government agencies are bringing to bear, both the Ontario government and the Federal government together are interested in seeing industry work with universities. So in the Province and in Southern Ontario you’ve got this tremendous critical mass of people ready to go with new technology, patents, intellectual property that can be applied to the automobile and to the processes of the manufacturing the automobile and you’ve got this perfect environment basically that companies can essentially leverage to make their plants more effective or make their products more competitive.

Well Waterloo is renowned for its student quality. I mean we have a fantastic energy within our students. First of all at the undergrad level, our entrance standards are unbelievably high and a lot of the desire to come to Waterloo stems not only from the academic program but also the co-op program. So you’ve got a culture of working with industry right from first year through graduation in an undergrad program which makes our students incredibly valuable from an employer perspective. And then secondly when we take those same students and other students from other universities and put them through Masters Degrees and PhD’s in automotive engineering, these students and these programs are very applied in nature and from a company point of view these are students who are going to hit the ground running. So they’re very competitive. They have extremely good knowledge of the new technologies and the new analysis techniques and experimental techniques. Our labs are very advanced; our computing is very advanced so you basically have a very attractive package to employers.

At the same time we’ve taken this critical mass of expertise covering a very, very broad spectrum of the automotive technologies, again both manufacturing in terms of the performance of the product, and we’ve co-located all of that into one university and we’ve built a center around that, WatCar which is going to help to coordinate and promote that. And then we’ve also gone and engaged auto companies across the entire automotive supply chain, from the materials companies who produce the materials that go into the raw production of the car, the tier one manufacturers, tier two manufacturers making the parts and the sub assemblies, right through the OEM’s, the original equipment manufacturers. So the big car companies both North American based and offshore based car companies, we’re working with the whole spectrum. So we have gained an understanding, we think, of what the auto sector needs from an R&D perspective and how that information and knowledge needs to be packaged so they can bring them into their environment and make good use of it. So I think we’ve got a fairly ripe environment that companies and investors would want to come in and take advantage of.

And then at the other end of the spectrum I’d say we also have faculty members who are very applied taking again, very advance technologies and applying them to traditional manufacturing and materials technologies and areas. When you have this entire spectrum then you have the ability to look out in the future and at the same time take some nearer term look that will have immediate payoffs for companies. Because again the auto industry is not under attack in ten years, it’s under attack right now. So we need to preserve what we have now. We have to make it better from a technological point of view and competitiveness point of view because that’s the type of activity that Ontario industry can be very good at. And our faculty gives us that whole range of expertise and perspective in terms of near term, far term advances. At the same time you mix in this great group of students that we have at Waterloo, again who in terms of their own interests will go advanced theoreticians to more practical applied engineering solutions and the Challenge X for example, that you mentioned is an excellent example. We have other student teams Formula SAE, Solar Car, Mini Baja, lots of these sort of very applied engineering…you know engineer and build a car and then see how it performs, or vehicle of some sort. Industry loves those guys because basically that type of student is well grounded in engineering but also isn’t afraid to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty in terms of the mechanical engineering, electrical engineering systems, whatever and make something work. And at the end of the day that type of engineer is extremely valuable.

One major example of how industry and university have come together, for example, is in our Ontario R&D Challenge Fund based project. We call it WatCAMM and it’s part of the so called CAMM centers which is the Center for Automotive Materials and Manufacturing and we collaborate with a number of other universities include McMaster for example. But that project has basically put about a 15 million dollar package together over five years with numerous car companies, materials companies, suppliers, tier one manufacturers for example, as well as the university researchers. Examples of where we work together include things like automotive manufacture and crash-worthiness. So not only can I make a part and shape it, but can I joint it together into a structure, a light weight car structure, and then how is it going to perform in a crash environment. And again we’ve worked with car companies; we’ve gone into their labs and their crash testing facilities. So we’ve taken structures our of advance materials fabricated at Waterloo and then tested at the car company themselves where they’ve actually done real time measurement of performance of a structure in a crash environment.

In terms of the artificial reality environment, our so called cave, what we’re doing there is we’re creating a stereo immersive environment where basically we will take these engineering models of stamping processes which are vested in the world of engineering science and mathematics and computing and can give us accurate models of the forming process. But what we want to do now is take the tool and die manufacturer; these skilled artisans know how to make parts function and work and how to make a stamping process work. We want to place them in a virtual reality environment that to them feels real. We’ll put the headsets on them for stereo vision, we’ll put the gloves on so they can feel the parts and we want them to make the part work before we actually start to cut tooling, thereby capturing the knowledge that these artisans have and merging it with the engineering science to bridge the gap between these two disciplines and get the maximum advantage in reducing time to market and making quality processes.

Michael J. Worswick, PhD, Peng
Professor
Director of WatCAR

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