Ames Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy, Ames, Iowa
Ames Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy, Ames, Iowa
AMES, Iowa -- The U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory will host a conference this month to further joint efforts by the federal government and private industry to improve automotive technology for the next century.
A conference for the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles will be held at Ames Laboratory on the Iowa State University campus January 17 and 18 to discuss promising new technologies at the Lab and how they relate to accomplishing the partnership's goals; to improve international competitiveness in automotive manufacturing, to apply commercially available innovations and to develop a "clean car" production prototype by the year 2004 that will get up to 80 miles per gallon at the same level of performance, utility and cost of ownership as today's vehicles. The PNGV includes representatives from the Big Three automakers and eight federal agencies, including the Departments of Transportation, Commerce, Energy, Defense and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Also convening will be the Clean Car Coordinating Committee (C-4), the federal government's research coordinating body to PNGV that includes members from a select group of national laboratories. Present but not formally convening will be representatives for the United States Council for Automotive Research (USCAR), industry's counterpart to the C-4 formed by Chrysler, Ford and General Motors in 1992 to strengthen the technology base of the domestic auto industry through cooperative, precompetitive research. USCAR joined with the federal government in 1993 to initiate PNGV.
"This conference is an excellent opportunity to acquaint the auto industry engineers and scientists and the other national lab representatives with our on-going research related to PNGV goals," says Iver Anderson, Ames Lab's representative to the PNGV and C-4. "We hope to form additional partnerships for our researchers between industry and the other national labs."
During the conference, attendees will tour Ames Lab and related facilities, learn about potential Lab technologies and explore collaborative work in areas of research identified as crucial to the goal. Such crucial technology areas include significantly reducing vehicle weight, increasing the efficiency of the drive train, reclaiming energy lost in braking and enhancing energy storage capacity. "We have a number of very innovative materials processing techniques, real-time sensing techniques, and 3-D computer simulation capabilities that we think can really help advance the PNGV effort," says Anderson.
Highlights of the conference will include a technical briefing by Lab researchers and a tour of the Lab's Plasma Spray Facility, Materials Preparation Center and the Photoacoustic Spectrometer and Transient Infrared Spectrometer Lab. A tour of related facilities is scheduled to include the Center for Nondestructive Evaluation, the Center for Advanced Technology Development, the Laboratory for Applied Research in Powder Processing and the Iowa Center for Emerging Manufacturing Technologies, which will feature a state-of-the-art, 3-D computer modeling CAVE (Computer Automated Virtual Environment).
Ames Laboratory is operated for the DOE by ISU. The Lab conducts research into various areas of national concern, including energy resources, high-performance computing, environmental cleanup and restoration, and the synthesis and study of new materials.