Moving on...

Yesterday was my last day of work at Multimatic. I'm headed back to school for an MBA at the Queen's School of Business. I'd only been at MTC (Multimatic Technical Centre) for a year...a year and two days exactly. It's a decent place to work, there a lot of highly capable people and I got along with almost everyone. In terms of Mechanical Engineering, there aren't many other places that have the capabilities that they have. Their core business is automotive hinges, but they're also into race cars, high end sports cars, and the occasional sailboat.

I got to work on an interesting project relating to European automotive standards for head impact protection in the event that a car hits a pedestrian or a bicyclist. The basic idea is that the hood of the car would be designed to absorb the energy of the impact of the victim's head as a method to reduce head trauma or fatalities. You can read more about it here.

In terms of design, there are two ways of achieving this goal. You can design a passive "soft" system where the hinge, supporting structure, and the hood buckle under the impact of the victim's head. The other method is to design an active system where the car has sensors on the front bumper to detect a collision and an active lift system where the hood is raised by about 50-150mm at the hinges. This youtube video shows the implementation of the system on a current Jaguar vehicle (EUMatic is a European division of Multimatic and they produce the hinges for Jaguar).

The project I worked on was an active system that was already in development, but I was tasked with designing a hinge system proposal for a future European version of the Chrysler 300. Instead of airbags or other pyrotechnic devices for lifting the hood, the system I was working on used gas struts. The central idea is that in the event of a false deployment (faulty sensor or impact with a garbage can or other inanimate object), the driver could just manually reset the system by opening the hood and continue driving. Currently, a false deployment with the Jaguar system would mean that the driver would have to call for a tow truck and have the hinges/hood/airbags replaced...pretty costly. The Multimatic system would protect against that.

I can't go into details about the project, but it was a really good learning experience. The workload was heavy but interesting. I did some pretty neat kinematics on the design side (something akin to this), had three quarters of the analysis department work on the strength and dynamics of the system, and got to be part of a technical review at the Chrysler Technical Centre in Auburn Hills, Michigan.

Unfortunately, even though the Chrysler engineers loved our system from a technical standpoint, the price tag was a little to high for their liking. The last I heard was that our system was around US$50 more per system than the next competitor. That came out to around US$6M more for the entire vehicle program. They went with a supplier that offered a non-resetting pyrotechnic system.

My last design task was to design some demo fixtures of the GM Tech World show where GM invited a select number of suppliers to show case their technologies. One of the demo fixtures was for the active system using a Saab 93 hood. It was really cool seeing the system in action...the fixture literally jumped of the floor. Pretty dramatic! It'll be interesting to hear about the reactions of the GM people.

In the end though, as interesting as that work was, I decided that it was time to move on to something different. Pursuing an MBA was a step that I need to take to get to do the kind of work that I'd grown more interested in. I'll write more about the thoughts that went to that decision in another post...