SAE show mirrors auto industry

Over 950 vendors displayed their products and services at this year's SAE World Congress. Courtesy of SAE.

In many ways, the SAE World Congress (held March 3–7 in Detroit's Cobo Center) mirrored the auto industry. It's been a tough year for both.

Despite the fact that SAE successfully convinced top-tier suppliers Denso and Yazaki to exhibit at this year's show, the number of exhibitors was down from years past when exhibitors filled the Cobo Center's main floor as well as an overflow hall in the basement. This year, the main floor was more than enough.

Attendance numbers were lower than expected, too, despite assurances from the SAE that OEM executives were solidly behind the Congress and that they would allow their engineers to attend. Two reasons for the low attendance come to mind. The first is that many engineers are now out of work. As sales have declined, both OEMs and suppliers have been laying off engineers, and many of these engineers may not have had the resources to attend the Congress if they live outside the Detroit area.

Second, those who still do have jobs may have been just too busy to attend. If this was the case, it is a shame, since participating in conferences like the Congress is an ideal way to stimulate the thought process and generate innovative ideas.

As always, the technical sessions were the bright spot of the Congress. More than 1000 papers were presented in nearly 200 technical sessions, covering the entire range of automotive technology; many sessions, of course, were related to test.

The four hottest topics seemed to be safety testing, emissions measurement and testing, accelerated and durability testing, and virtual testing, including hardware-in-the-loop. Twenty-three papers were presented on the topic of airbag and safety test methodology. One interesting paper in this track described how test equipment and test methods have changed in response to changes in federal regulations (see "Testing adapts to new regulations," p. A8).

The emissions measurement and testing seminars were also informative. One paper described a study on the effectiveness of vehicle exhaust emissions analyzers. Other papers covered diesel-emissions measurement.

There has been a lot of talk recently about using diesel engines in passenger cars here in the US. Accordingly, engineers are showing more interest in diesel-emissions measurement. The technical sessions covering this topic drew standing-room-only crowds, and several companies introduced new systems for making these measurements.

Perhaps the most activity was in simulation and hardware-in-the-loop testing. Several sessions were devoted to this topic, and several vendors were hocking new simulation and HIL products. One technical paper proposed virtual prototyping of a two-wheeled vehicle, and another proposed virtual testing of plastic trim components (see "HIL and virtual test reduce test times and save money," p. A5).

Virtual prototyping and virtual test are two technologies that are helping to reduce the cost of test and speed development. Yet, there is still work to be done. As the paper about testing plastic trim points out, engineers performing virtual tests need more data to make their models more realistic.

As this data is gathered, you can bet that the researchers will present their findings at an upcoming SAE World Congress. Next year's conference will held in Detroit, March 8–12, 2004. See you there.

You can order the papers discussed in this issue at: http://www.sae.org/servlets/techtrack?PROD_TYP=PAPER#ordering.