How to make a career in Automotive Engineering
To make a career in automotive engineering, there are several engineering technology programs that are offered as various academic courses helping you to specialize in designing vehicles, such as, cars, trucks, etc.
You gather the expertise in providing help to build and test the vehicles, and learn how to repair and maintain with the appropriate tools and instruments. When you watch TV, you come across commercials advertising cars and other vehicles.
If you ponder for once how much it costs the vehicle manufacturers to advertise, you would be able to realise how vast the automobile industry is. If you watch the commercials closely, you will find that features of the vehicle are advertised also, such as, side air-bags, disappearing fold down seats, gas-electric hybrids, and many more.
It is evident that someone had to design these features which are now being made available in the vehicle.
When designing a vehicle, the design break-through comes from the automobile engineers, who have the specialization to design automobiles.
The job that you have as an automobile design engineer is to design the components that go into the vehicle, test them in the laboratory, and qualify them as the components which have been correctly designed. Automobile design engineers put the concept of a vehicle into reality.
The making of an Automobile
The products manufactured by the automotive industry are the passenger cars, trucks, vans, sport concerned vehicles, busses, and recreational vehicles.
The industry is one of the largest industry in the US and employees over 2 million people.
Automotive industries are mostly concentrated in the Great Lakes area, especially in Michigan, but it can be found in most of the other parts of the country as well.
Employment opportunities in the industry offers tens and thousands of job to the higher skilled personnel, such as, highly educated scientists, engineers, managers, and other professionals. It also has large openings for thousands of skilled workers, who largely work in the production line, and unskilled laborers.
Generally, each of the automobile manufacturers bring out new line of vehicles every year, the planning and design of which start at least two to three years earlier before you find it in a dealer’s showroom. Before these new line of vehicles are brought out, the planning stage of these new models are first considered by the company’s highest officials, along with their product planning group.
Here the broad outline of the vehicles are decided, deciding on matters, such as, whether to emphasize on luxury models or to consider such matters as to keep the price low. The aspects on safety measures, fuel economy, the size, the weight, and air pollution control are also considered and decided.
[Italy] Crp Technology
Having been a primary active partner to the main Racecar Constructors for more than 30 years, CRP Technology offers a unique opportunity to the Motor Sport market: a support throughout the entire project, including the manufacturing process.
CRP has been instrumental in the success of many race winning F1, Moto GP, Rally Raid, ALMS and World Rally Championship teams.
What makes this company different are the partnerships we have formed with the different teams. CRP is involved at the earliest design and development stages and our innovative approach to the use of new materials and technology is widely recognised by the race car industry.
CRP Technology therefore provides race car design and construction services to competition car constructors and motoracing teams.
Constantly developing and improving itself, CRP’s business is nowadays constituted by:
- The complete creation of mechanical parts, especially for sports racing cars, including the study and engineering of the customer’s main project, to the choice of the manufacturing process
- The sale of parts made by layer manufacturing techniques using internally developed composite materials WINDFORM branded
- Production and commercialization of those WINDFORM composite materials for laser sintering all around the world.
Automotive engineering brings processors in vehicles
Automotive engineering has brought in advanced concepts in today’s auto industries. Cars are now installed with 8- to 16- to 32-bit processors, with thoughts of introducing the state-of-art processor technology in the very near future.
The proven technology of dual core processors, bring in speed and faster computing power, with a lower clock speed, hence consuming less power. This would mean less heat generation. In modern information technology systems, dual core processors have already created a mark, with thoughts going on for multi-core processors to be soon introduced in the market.
In the past, auto manufacturers have used dual-core processors in automotive engineering, but the thoughts are fast changing with applications taking a new turn. It is understood that some auto manufacturers is contemplating using triple-core processors in vehicles, and is also working with groups to implement quad-core processor systems.
There are many areas in automotive engineering that have notable application that require the performance of dual-core processors. The most important areas of application are fuel saving, and emission reductions, with diagnosis of safety management and transformation of hardware based functions to systems based on software.
With regards to the transformation from single-core units to dual-core would be simpler than, if this change was required to be made from a 16-bit system to a 32-bit processor. There would have been requirement for wide changes in the software making it suitable to run on a 32-bit system. As for the transformation from single-core to dual-core, the changes would be simpler, without having any major re-writes.
Car suspension system in automotive engineering
Automotive engineering has brought forth the ability in today’s cars to reach a balance between the riding comfort and its road handling capability. This has been achieved through an active suspension control installed in the car, through a typical distributed control system. We discuss here a brief account of the mechanism of an active suspension system in a vehicle, where the distributed structure of the mechanism has been taken into account.
Automotive engineering has helped to conceive the theory of embedded distributed control architectures that have come to be the first and foremost innovation in modern cars, which have been applied to achieve improvements in performance in the vehicles. The system costs more than a quarter of the cost that is required to manufacture a car, which has made the car manufacturers to have a re-look at the costing and make improvement of the effective cost of the vehicle.
Introduction of such technologies have brought disadvantages. With computers deployed in the architectural design of the system in controlling the suspensions of a car, it has given rise to delays and jitters in the vehicles, giving rise to degraded performance.
Deployment of larger computer systems in the architecture has been found to solve the problem, but it has become a hard challenge for the car manufacturers to reduce prices and meet the competition.
With the advent of modern automotive engineering, the architectural concepts of distributed control have been applied in active suspension control systems in vehicles in order to provide a smoother ride.
This suspension control system comprises of a set of mechanisms at the four corners of a vehicle. These are springs, shock absorbers, and a hydraulic actuator. These four sets of mechanisms provide the car with a better road holding and improved comfort, with the suspension buffering all the forces between the vehicle and the road.
From CRP Technology a new Aluminium Alloy. CRP 8601
CRP Technology has launched a brand new product on the market.
It is not a castable product.
This material may successfully overcome high performance aluminium alloys such as: 7075, 7050, 2014, 2024, 2618, and others.
F1 industry uses MMC materials (i.e. AMC 225xe) while Super Aluminium materials, and therefore the new CRP 8601 alloy, are particularly suited for all the other motorsport racing series and for the aerospace sector.
The key benefits of CRP 8601 for structural applications include:
- Weight saving
- Increased component stiffness
- High fatigue resistance
- Good hardness & wear resistance
- High flexibility of the billets shapes/dimensions for machining
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