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.

Rules of attraction
At the end of March, AT&T announced a multi-year partnership with CU-ICAR that included $1.5 million earmarked for infrastructure and $1 million to upfit the AT&T Auditorium at the Campbell Graduate Engineering Center. AT&T also created an endowment to ensure that technology remains up to date.

This announcement is another feather in the cap of CU-ICAR, and the realization of a dream that Christian Przirembel, vice president for Research and Economic Development, says began in the summer of 2000. “I had the good fortune to be involved in this from the beginning when President Barker asked the question of how can Clemson get a research and development facility located in Greenville,” he recalls.

What followed was a fortuitous melding of many components.

Looking back, Clemson President Jim Barker says that CU-ICAR “brings together the academic and research strengths of a research university, the public support of state government and the private support of an existing strong industry in the region. None of these entities could have created CU-ICAR without the involvement and support of the other two. But together we present a powerful statement to the automotive industry and to the world about what Clemson University and South Carolina have to offer. To date, CU-ICAR accounts for $225 million in public and private investment and 500 new high-paying, technology-oriented jobs at the CU-ICAR.”

Przirembel describes CU-ICAR’s development in step-by-step terms: Identify academic strengths, locate a property to be anchored by the academic unit surrounded by buildable land to attract private sector investors; design a campus that invites interaction, not just in meetings but informally; put forth a dedicated effort to recruit partners. Przirembel says that AT&T is the latest addition to a corporate roster that includes Timken, Sun Microsystems, Mazda and two Tier One suppliers among others.

The campus seemed literally to spring up overnight, and now other projects across the Upstate are following its model.

Global impact
Both Barker and Przirembel stress that Clemson is committed to seeing these current projects through before embarking on others, while Geolas admits, “CU-ICAR is a long-term economic development project that is much further ahead of where I thought we would be at this point. While we are local, we are competing globally. National economic conditions, global incentives, funding and research will have a lot to do with how quickly we see development. We certainly hope the next 10 years will be as promising as the first four have been.”

The road can’t always be smooth

For those who zip down Interstate 85 between Laurens and Woodruff roads at highway speeds, it is difficult to appreciate the amount of construction that is taking place on the CU-ICAR campus.

Speed is an appropriate word in more ways than one. Buildings have sprung out of the ground in record time. Most notably, CU-ICAR’s Collaboration 3 structure, which faces the interstate and is occupied by the Timken Co., was completed in less than a year.

But the course of development didn’t always run smoothly. And a legal battle loaded with drama created plenty of speed bumps.

Establishing CU-ICAR called for a complex series of negotiations and required that a diverse group of people and organizations come together to achieve a common goal. The state government, including Gov. Mark Sanford and former Gov. Jim Hodges, Clemson University, the city of Greenville, the estate of John D. Hollingsworth, BMW and developer Clifford Rosen were the major players.

The eventual development would depend on whether the state and BMW would agree to provide funding for a graduate engineering program on property controlled by Rosen.

The result was not only that CU-ICAR’s Campbell Graduate Engineering Center came to fruition along with corporate neighbors such as Timken and AT&T, but also that Rosen would file a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against BMW. Rosen’s suit alleged that BMW engineered a “far-reaching government conspiracy to harm him” by asking state officials and Clemson to breach an earlier agreement, according to documents attached to BMW’s motion for summary judgment.

Let’s rewind. BMW’s law firm, Haynsworth Sinkler Boyd P.A. in Greenville, traced the auto manufacturer’s partnership with Clemson to 1992, when BMW first located in South Carolina and wanted to provide additional training for its workers, as well as to foster faculty exchanges between Clemson and the Technical University of Munich.

In 2001, BMW suggested that they would be interested in partnering with Clemson to create a graduate program in automotive engineering.  At the same time, Clemson was exploring the possibility of creating a presence in Greenville as well as the development of a wind tunnel and museum for the racing industry. When Clemson presented the ideas to BMW, the automaker indicated it was not interested in funding a wind tunnel.

Enter Rosen. The developer in late 2001 told Don Rice, a sports science employee of Clemson, that if he could find at least 100 acres of land suitable for both the Center and the project he wanted to develop around it, Rosen would be willing to donate 20-25 acres to Clemson for the Center for Motor Sports Excellence. He agreed to work with Clemson to develop a master plan for use of the property that would be compatible to both the University’s educational and testing needs as well as the commercial needs of his project, according to court filings.

These negotiations were never completed.

Rosen acquired land in excess of 100 acres from the Hollingsworth Foundation, which, according to court records, agreed to sell to him only because he was working with Clemson. But Sanford’s questions about the proposed development’s value to taxpayers prompted a restructuring of the deal.

Shortly thereafter, the state passed an economic development bond act that assisted BMW in funding the graduate program for Clemson, provided they invest $400 million and create 400 jobs. The state also told Rosen there would be no funding for a wind tunnel.

In October 2003, the Clemson University Real Estate Foundation and Rosen reached an agreement that provided for the sale of land for the new campus. Clemson could acquire 250 of the 407-acre parcel without any development rights or fees for Rosen. CU-ICAR would be located adjacent to the land Rosen purchased. BMW and the state agreed to site the graduate school at CU-ICAR.

Real estate records show that Rosen’s gross profit was $7.4 million, yet BMW’s filings show that he claimed more than $44 million in charitable tax deductions for the land transactions covered by this new agreement.

Despite his profits, Rosen sued BMW in 2005. The motion for summary judgment, which came in October 2007, indicated that Rosen “could not show that BMW acted without justification for an ‘improper purpose,’” or that there was a “civil conspiracy.”

The motion passed.