By Lydia Dishman
Contributing Writer

A rhythmic beep-beep and a flashing yellow light alert you to the slow, sideways slide of a glossy, white oversized door. Below this door, a narrow steel plate rises up to seal the recess so you can safely cross over the threshold.

Step inside and you’ll find a room with walls that are paneled in an Op Art black-and-white geometric design. As you walk around, you can’t help but notice that your footfalls are eerily muffled even though the space is empty except for a broad platform set slightly off center.

If you’re thinking this is some hipster lounge with entry only for VIPs, you’d only be partly wrong.

This is the Vehicle Electronics Lab at the Campbell Graduate Engineering Center at Clemson University International Center for Automotive Research in Greenville. What happens in this 34-by-34-by-18 semi-anechoic chamber is techno-industrial (not music) research and testing. Just one of seven “major test cells” within the Center, the Electronics Lab has full vehicle and component testing capability including electromagnetic emissions testing, electrostatic discharge susceptibility testing and vehicle diagnostics.

The methods are complex but the purpose is simple. Todd Hubing, Michelin Endowed Chair in Vehicular Electronic Systems Integration, explains, “We are trying to find better ways of putting electronics into a vehicle to make it more economic and power efficient.”

Right in our backyard
By “we,” Hubing means Clemson University graduate students who are working towards a degree in electrical engineering. They, along with nine faculty members and several other graduate students who focus on mechanical engineering, make up the “VIPs” who have regular access to the state-of-the-art facilities at the Campbell Center. They are working on the future of the automobile. And from their vantage point, in the light-filled building on the CU-ICAR campus off Interstate 85 in Greenville, the future looks brighter than the gleam off a club kid’s grill.

Tom Kurfess, director of the Center as well as professor and BMW Chair of Manufacturing, sits in one such illuminated office. A floor-to-ceiling window looks out over the series of retention ponds that reveal CU-ICAR’s work-in-progress state.

“We have a 90,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art facility here that you won’t find anywhere else in the country,” he says, emphasizing capabilities such as the test cell that simulates temperature changes from 40 below zero to 140 F. “With funding from industry and government partners, we can put out applications and generate results. We each have our own areas of focus with a dedicated lab space, but every professor has access to the others.”

Bob Geolas, executive director of CU-ICAR, loves to hear this. He’s been saying that innovation is a body contact sport since he came on board four years ago. And here it is, unfolding.

The key, Kurfess believes, is integration. If you spend any time at all on the CU-ICAR campus, you’ll find that systems integration is a phrase that is bandied about a lot. Hubing and his students look for innovations in electronics, not just as add-on components but as part of the whole. Hubing points out that by reducing the amount of wires, there is less need for copper, which adds to the vehicle’s weight.

John Ziegert, the Timken Chair in Design, and his group are focused on lightweight engineering of the sub-system which includes the power train and suspension.

Ziegert’s challenge is to preserve safety without sheer mass. “NASCAR drivers crash at 200 miles per hour and can walk away. Now, the average person doesn’t want to get in and out of a car through the window like the race car drivers, but it shows that safety is more a function of design than mass,” Ziegert says.

He is also working on functional integration in the design philosophy. “We are working on a suspension design project to reduce weight and find out how we can use compliant elements that both store energy and provide kinematic (motion) guidance,” explains Ziegert.

“My area is high-precision measurement robotics,” Kurfess says, describing how a machine would need to be engineered to efficiently pop the front seat into a car on an assembly line. “Manufacturing systems (address) design, assembly and getting all the parts together, but also how to bring all the different suppliers together,” he explains.

One common goal is fuel efficiency. Ziegert says, “People understand that it is a problem, but the auto manufacturers are under tremendous economic pressure to get new models out in the shortest possible time.”

This is one reason why the research at the Campbell Graduate Center becomes indispensable to the industry. And why companies such as Timken and, most recently, AT&T, have invested millions to create a presence and a partnership on the campus.