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2004 SAE President Duane D. Tiede (left) and 2005 SAE President J. E. Ted Robertson (right) present the 2004 SAE Henry Ford II
Distinguished Award for Excellence in Automotive Engineering to Dr. Jianmin Gu. The presentation was held April 12 at the Honors Convocation
Luncheon held in conjunction with the SAE 2005 World Congress in Cobo Center, Detroit. |
Dr. Jianmin Gu will likely remember the first part of 2005 as an exciting time in his professional life. First, he was a member of a team at Ford Motor Company that received the 2004 SAE Henry Ford II Distinguished Award for Excellence in Automotive Engineering. He also received a promotion at Ford shortly thereafter.
Gu and his colleagues, Paul W. Erlandson (team leader), Michael B. Bamford, and Charles M. Robeck received the award for what the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) termed, “their significant contributions in developing a new non-linear transient analysis method to accurately predict the transient vibration performance of a vehicle, and in directly applying the method to numerous vehicle programs to improve vehicle NVH performance, quality and customer satisfaction.” The presentation was made at the annual SAE World Congress in Detroit in April 2005. The award, established in 1988, is designed to recognize individuals or teams who have made significant contributions to the passenger car, truck and bus industries.
According to Gu, the new Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) method the team worked on allows accurate prediction of complex transient vibration phenomena, such as automatic transmission shift feels and engine start/stops. Non-linear time-domain effects, which cannot be handled by traditional analysis tools, are accurately addressed in the method. Developed within Ford first, this method has become the corporate analytical procedure for prediction and verification of vehicle shift quality performance. It has been widely applied to vehicle programs for both up-front design verification and problem resolution.
“You can call what we have been doing virtual prototyping,” said Gu. “Rather than build an expensive physical prototype, like a hardware vehicle, we build a virtual prototype, a computer model, to test the vehicle for how it’s likely to behave. Specifically, we developed and applied this new CAE method to better predict vehicle Noise, Vibration and Harshness (NVH) related performances during automatic transmission gear shifts.”
“The analytical analyses were so successful in capturing enough physics to accurately predict sources of problems as well as to identify potential solutions that we began receiving internal requests to apply the method in other areas. While the CAE tools can be used to identify problems and potential solutions after a vehicle is launched, a more valuable application occurs or should occur early in the design process when seeking to avoid or minimize the potential NVH-related problems to pop out later. This saves time and money for Ford.”
The SAE honor is the latest in a number of awards Gu has received. He was recognized as the Engineer of The Month, CAE and Durability Engineering, at Ford in March 2005 and received the Vehicle Evaluation and Verification Achievement Award at Ford the previous year. He also received numerous academic awards and fellowships while a student at the University.
Gu joined Ford in April 2000 following his graduation from the University of Michigan as a Research Engineer in the Vehicle NVH & CAE Department under the Research & Vehicle Technology organization. (ed. note: These department and organization names are obsolete now due to reorganizations at Ford.)
Because of his record of achievement, Dr. Gu was promoted in June 2005. He assumed the position of “Technical Expert for Vehicle Shift Quality CAE,” a management role position at Ford. Among his new responsibilities will be to apply appropriate CAE tools upfront to predict vehicle shift quality performance; consult in technical matters related to shift quality, transmission and axle NVH issues; co-lead cross-functional, multi-attribute teams in identifying and resolving shift quality issues; and identify new technology trends in the field of shift quality CAE.
Prior to receiving his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan in 2000, Dr. Gu received a bachelor’s degree in Ocean Engineering and Technological and Engineering Economics (dual major) with honors (1992) and a master’s degree in Structural Mechanics (1995), both from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China. Recently, Dr. Gu was admitted to the Evening MBA program at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business beginning Fall 2005.