Like snowbirds returning from Florida, spring brings automotive engineers to Detroit for the Society of Automotive Engineers’ annual World Congress. As with the North American Auto Show held in the same space, the show has shrunk considerably from its heyday, but we still managed to find some choice tech tidbits scattered amongst the gasket and washer displays.
Robots aren’t perfect. As they wear, they can drift away from their programmed location for spotwelds, adhesive beads, weld-nuts or whatever. Today automakers might catch this by pulling a part or assembly off the line every so often, bringing it into a special room with high-precision $20,000–$50,000 cameras and machine-vision equipment to measure things.
Sensify all the things, is a motto of U.K.-based TG0, which demonstrated a line of metal-free switches enabling control of devices via tactile sensing, deformation sensing, and pressure mapping. The switches consist of a non-conductive “A side” surface the user sees and touches, backed by a conductive B side typically loaded with carbon materials that enable capacitive touch.The complete lack of metals and rare earths lowers cost and weight, and makes the parts easier to assemble and recycle.
The best SAE Shows feature an oddball engine concept, and this year’s example is the Waissi engine. Mostly it’s a novel crankshaft concept applied to a traditional four-stroke piston engine. The concept was first shown off in 2013, but this year Dr. Waissi brought a running prototype to display.The concept involves horizontally opposed piston pairs.
Waissi envisions his engine powering unmanned aerial drones, auxiliary power units, or possibly as a range-extender. Color us highly skeptical of Waissi’s assertions that the friction between the crankdisk and piston bottoms will pencil out to less than that of the two connecting rods it replaces, but we wish him luck in developing his concept and returning to future SAE shows.
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