Automotive Research Advances in Smart Materials and Devices at the GM/UM SMS Collaborative Research Laboratory

The field of smart materials and structures has evolved in the last 10 years to the point of viability for commercial mass-production industries. A good example of this is the automotive industry where there has been a 600% increase in patent applications. While the fundamental science is present for many smart materials such as shape memory alloys or piezoelectrics, there have been only a few instances of successful commercialization due to lack of technology and industrial infrastructure. To make a clear path to hasten the transition from all the progress made during the past decades of research into launched competitive products, General Motors (GM) has teamed with the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan (UM) to establish a $2.9 Million Collaborative Research Laboratory (CRL) in the area of Smart Materials and Structures. The mission of the SMS CRL is to exploit the emerging capabilities of smart materials and structures to create and support innovative advanced device technologies for application within the automotive industry. The SMS CRL is structured into three thrust areas: Smart Device Technology Innovation, Smart Materials Maturity, and Mechamatronic System Design Methodology. This paper presents a brief overview of the mission, global infrastructure and collaborative philosophy of the GM/UM SMS CRL and its recent advancements including: devices for pedestrian protection, Shape Memory Alloy (SMA) technologies such as ultrafast latches and linear ratchet drives, SMA material modeling, characterization, and shakedown studies, and model-based design tools for SMA wires. The most important accomplishment has been the new research and development paradigm that has at the core a truly collaborative, cross–talk relationship between all the multi-level thrust areas and the SMS CRL team composed of researchers, students, and engineers across the world resulting in synergism between projects to accelerate the time between theory and concept to fruitful applicable results.