Plastics Today have announced that the chief engineer of body and interior design at Honda R&D Americas and the head of polymer engineering at the Fraunhofer ICT will headline the upcoming Lightweighting AutoPlastics 2012 Conference to be held in Troy, Michigan. Honda’s Lawrence Geise and Fraunhofer’s Frank Henning will address how the North American industry will manage the challenge of complying to Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, which will be pushed 54.5 MPG.
The Lightweighting AutoPlastics 2012 Conference, which takes place on the 14th and 15th of November 2012, will offer attendees a review of lightweighting programs to meet the fuel-efficiency standards from across the automotive supply chain. Presenters will be drawn from automotive OEMs, Tier 1 suppliers, resin manufacturers, and upstream suppliers.
In addition to Geise and Henning, speakers include:
- Stephen Ridella, Director of Vehicle Crashworthiness Research, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration-U.S. Department of Transportation
- Raymond Boeman, Program Director of Energy Partnerships, Oak Ridge National Laboratory-U.S. Department of Energy
- Adrian Lund, President, Insurance Institute for Highway Safety
- Patrick Blanchard, Composites Group Leader, Ford Research & Innovation Center
- Avetik Harutyunyan, Chief Scientist, Honda Research Institute
Sessions over the two day event include:
- Reviewing sustainable mobility trends and pressures for lightweight vehicle design and forecasting the impact on automakers and their plastic suppliers
- Large scale manufacturing of automotive composites – Technologies and trends
- Understanding the Department of Transportation’s perspectives on automobile lightweighting to devise timely and effective strategies for plastics and advanced composites
- Adopting a material-focused approach to mass reduction through intelligent design to bring low-cost, high-volume carbon fiber composites to next-generation vehicles
The conference will take place at the Troy, MI headquarters of Altair Engineering. Altair is a product design and development, engineering software, and cloud computing software company. Founded in 1985, Altair has regional offices throughout America, Europe, and Asia.
Find out more about the conference here